Malandrinha

Jean Michel Alberola

2016-04-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

Currently reading Michel Foucault's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe). Starting with Magritte's drawing, Foucault speaks of calligrammes, that take the language one step further by showing that which the words are referring to. He describes however how impossible it is to both read and see the drawing at the same time - the moment you can read the words, the image disappears and the other way around.

Magritte, Ceci n'est pas une pipe

I started thinking of the exhibition I saw recently of Jean-Michel Alberola at the Palais de Tokyo.
I'm still not quite sure what to think of Alberola's work. I resent the importance of rebus in this artist's practice. I abhor rebus. And yet this calligramme thing made me think of one of Alberola's work in neon light representing a skull. When you look more closely you see that the skull is made of the word Rien - nothing - but distorted so as to become what the artist describes as vanity (thus playing with Vanitas). Word becoming an image that fills the gap left by the word itself - in our mind at least.

Alberola uses words a lot in his works. Those can be used to take the image one step further, they can also be used to create or highlight the distance between the image and the viewer. Thus in the series around "La Vision des habitants de Watts en 1965" (The Vision of Watts' residents in 1965) (and there is a similar series for Ferguson), showing views of a city - cars parked in a street, houses, something that resemble a gas station. Close up views, photographic like, with no human beings; the colors are neutral with a predominance of greyish white, with something like black cloud darkening the scenes.

These images - of what we assume are views of Watts or Ferguson - do not fill the whole surface of the painting. They appear to be superposed to a color background that forms like a secondary frame around the image: the impression is that of cut photographs placed on a colored paper or covered by transparent squares: what we see here are not paintings of a street or a house, but rather it is the representation of an image of that street or that house.

Then there are these words: ".paupière supérieure." (.upper eyelid.), placed at the top of the painting, and ".paupière inférieure." (.lower eyelid.), placed at the bottom of the painting.

In "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" Foucault shows how Magritte took the text out of the Caligramme but without giving it its 'textual' nature: the letters are still a drawing within the image, images of letters, words, that stretch the image of the pipe, take it one step further, but do not illustrate it.

Alberola's eyelid are similarly images of words, drawn rather than written, painted. They are made to look like they were typed on the painting: they have the appearance of printed characters from a newspaper, not handwritten. And they are not fully integrated to the image, as they tend to appear on the color frame around the image.

Therefore, despite his choice of a rather sensitive and topical subject matter, what Alberola seems to be questioning here is our overall perception of these events, seen through the prism of a newspaper article, through a journalist's eyelids.
They also highlight our distance from these events, the directness of the painted image broken, put at a distance, by these words, this reference to the act of seeing. But whose act? Is it a reference to someone else's eyes watching the scene, or rather our own eyes looking at the painting?
The act of watching is also alluded to in the title, "The Vision of Watts' residents in 1965". What the residents saw then, the title making me think of the sentence "a vision from hell". Not that these images are what we would normally see of the events, of violence etc, but rather a darkened vision of elements of the everyday (cars, houses...).

So to return to Magritte, again, Alberola links images and words, linguistic symbols with aesthetic elements, and like Magritte, he avoids affirmations. As he puts it himself, he "simply ask the question" and "the more precise the question the better I can work with it".
And I think that leaving these questions open, unresolved, creates this "unspoken part" of the work of art that he speaks of, that is "the only place from which we can dialogue". For him "it is around this obscurity that any true exchange can take place" between the artist and the viewers of his work.

And I think I may have found the source of my frustration in front of his work: he does not give the answers and I don't seem to have them.

October 2015 - Frieze and FIAC

2015-11-06T05:19:00.000-08:00

Frieze and FIAC this year felt very much like the start of the school year: nothing painful, but a new beginning, full of energy: having been silent since July, I obviously need it...

Some happy reunions at the Frieze first, where I was pleasantly surprised to find the gueules cassées of Magnus Plessen, which I had discovered in Berlin two years ago at Konrad Fischer's.

Magnus Plessen, Ohne Title

Discovered at the Frieze last year, I found I still liked the cracked-paint cloths of Edith Dekyndt and it was with great enthusiasm that I saw new photographs by Pedro Cabrita Reis.

Nina Canell was present too, on Barbara Wien's stand, as she continues her exploration of invisible force fields, of energy flows, with the presentation of two white blinds discoloured by the light of the sun, Those Million Tons of Light (below). Each blind was attached to a switched-off neon-light, placed at the top, and they were presented rather low on the wall, Canell insisting that those are indeed paintings, monochromes of light, not sculptures.

Nina Canell, Those Million Tons of Light

In front of her, large scale photographs by Japanese artist Shimabuku showed enlargement of salt crystals, white and translucent, on a shiny black background. In a little text on the wall the artist describes how the pyramidal shape of the crystals struck him and naively explains how he believes they inspired the Egyptians with their own pyramids.

Hazardous and playful, poetic too and rather eccentric, I also loved his photograph of a flower floating in water.

At the FIAC, I particularly liked the stand of Jocelyn Wolff, with a beautiful installation by Katinka Bock who develops there her sculptural approach around construction materials, associating her usual cooked ceramic with other everyday objects, such as a blue cushion, a large scale, an iron bar.

Two other artists next to her explored the status of the work of art as an object.

Elodie Seguin, Peintures Ecrins

First, with two boxes placed directly on the floor, their lid next to them, Elodie Seguin presented her "Peintures écrins", jewel cases paintings. In each case rested a vibrant monochrome, one a luminous bluish white and the other an intense fluorescent yellow. These had been obtained by crushing pigments onto the canvas. A technic that refers strongly to the history of paintings, which she seems to be always questioning in our work, as well as our relation to art works. As such, the title highlights their objects-like status, and their precious and hidden character, intimate: a jewel is not something you share. And it seems for her, her work is not something she part with easily, she explains that to part with one of her works for her is akin to a loss, the work becoming suspended in time.

Also present, Francisco Tropa's objects, beautiful marquetry of puzzle-like arrangement of shapes, around a wooden hourglass. Da Vinci- like, these sculptures always seem mysterious: so scientific and precise, they must have been created for a hidden purpose.

This mystery, however, is altogether defeated by the simplicity of the shapes, through which the very construction of these objects become evident. This simplicity contradicts directly our first impression, highlights the absence of use. What's a stake here is a story: these works have a strong narrative power, telling each viewer a different story. Here, with the hourglass burried at the core and the puzzle forming a cube, I think of time and space, of hidden things.

Big coup de coeur also for Sarah Sze's fragile sculptures, at Victoria Miro, and for Chilean artist Enrique Ramires at Michel Rein.

With Los Durmientes Enrique Ramires made a movie on victims of the Chilean dictatorship that were thrown into the sea from helicopters, tied to railway ties. This work was in my mind when I saw his installation on Michel Rein's stand: a vertical line of small wooden frames, in which a black sail sewn by the artist father with a yellow circle at its centre, is attached to a black background. Looking at it from the first frame (at the bottom for for me) towards the top, the sail appears to be rising within the frames, as a sun rise would on a film roll. Especially moving by its simplicity and childlike imagery.

Cannot wait for next October!

Les Rencontres d'Arles start again (finally...)

2015-07-20T14:35:00.000-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated

Mold is beautiful (SFP, Luce Lebart, 2015)

Let's be clear: this edition of the Rencontres Photographiques d'Arles (until 20 September unless otherwise stated) is a turning point. After a slow degradation of the quality of the Rencontres throughout the years (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) up until this catastrophic edition in 2014 (which I had boycotted without any regrets), this year feels like a new breath, an improvement, a more pleasant atmosphere. I dared last year to make some common sense suggestions, saying out loud what others were only whispering anonymously and I must say that this year, I'm happy. First, the Rencontres are open on the city, reconciled with other actors, respectful of the students of the school, collaborating with the Off; the space Cosmos (only during the opening week) is remarkable, gathering books and small exhibitions (above, mold affecting photographs of the SFP collection (1), presented by Luce Lebart in this space). The best example was, in my view, the integration of Gypsies from the Papeteries Etienne in the Night of the Year: an anecdote, almost nothing, but a strong sign.

Markus Brunetti, Reims, Cathédrale Notre-Dame, 2013-2014

Then the real estate constraint has had the positive effect of reducing the number of exhibitions, and thus to lead to a more rigorous selection. If Pascal needed time to write shorter letters, the Rencontres needed to have less space to do better. About 35 exhibitions instead of 50 and especially a focus on, essentially, three axes: some great names, some discoveries, some singularities. If some exhibitions are somewhat disappointing in their too limited approach (the thunderbolt, neon lights) or in their confusing form (thus I remain cold in front of Brunetti's church façade reworked to become unreal, as above) only one made me scream (wait a bit to know that), I liked a lot of them and some have excited me, I will return in more details in my next posts.

Vincent Ferrané, Bienvenue, Commanderie Sainte-Luce, Arles, exhibition view

Finally I had expressed the desire of seeing more exhibitions and not just photographs hanged here and there, hoping to see more "curating": it is still quite uneven [but a very promising sign is that in his interview with OAI113, Sam Stourdzé said that while he is the artistic director of the festival he is not its only curator, that he worked with 39 curators, including young ones, and he would like Arles to be not only the festival of photographers but also a festival for curators]. Some very beautiful exhibitions are still simple photographs aligned next to each other; perhaps what we need is more guessed curators. Two of the most intelligently presented exhibitions are, I think, the one of Walker Evans' work for the press (of which I will speak again; curator and text by David Campany and Jean-Paul Derrider) and, at the other end of the spectrum, the small poetic exhibition of Vincent Ferrané around the "non-lieux"(curated by Fannie Escoulen, text by Léa Bismuth; until 30 August). A contrario, for example, the visit of Stephen Shore exhibition (I will return to this too), no matter how remarkable the photographs, is a long one-way stroll from room to room where visitors can only "consume" in line, image after image.

Chaise longue edited by Martin Parr, Église des Frères Prêcheurs, Arles

A questionable example of curating, in my eyes, is the exhibition gathering works by Mathieu Chedid and Martin Parr in the church of the Preachers Brothers (until 30 August). I'm not a huge fan, neither of one (but my musical tastes...) not the other. The idea of a dialogue between a musical and a photographer is certainly worth exploring, but beyond their rather politically correct statement ("I discovered his music", "I love his photos"), I struggled to follow their dialogue, to understand their sequence, to grasp their harmony. The choice here to break a piece of Chedid in 8 tracks (vocals, synth, piano, etc) and to involve each in a mode of presentation of Parr's photographs (projection, posters, small frames...) is certainly an amusing deconstruction, but how to go beyond this aertifice, how to bring out some sense? I do not know; the ecclesial staging is strong (even if the lounging chair signed by Martin Parr hardly make you want to sit in them) but it fell a bit short. Of Martin Parr, without surprise (for me), I preferred his old photographs in black and white, more humble, more tender, rather than the biting irony, almost contemptuous, of his work with colour.

Martin Parr. GB. England. Yorkshire. Hebden Bridge. Hangingroyd Road. Tom Greenwood cleaning. 1975.

(1): Ethical note: Lunettes Rouges is Treasurer of the SFP but did not participate to this exhibition

Photos from the author except for Brunetto (curtesy of the Rencontres and the artist and Hartmann Projects) and Parr (Magnum)

Form and content: the three photographs of the Novo Branco price

2015-07-12T10:34:00.001-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 17 June 2015

Ayrson Heráclito, O Sacudimento da Maison des Esclaves em Gorée Díptico I – Sacerdotes , 2015

How to reconcile the discourse and the form? image and content? These comments, which might seem abstract and philosophical, are perfectly illustrated in the exhibition of three photographers selected for the 2015 Novo Banco award at the Berardo Museum (until 11 October) and whose winner will be announced on 22 September. This award replaces the BES award (like Novo Banco replaces the bankrupt Espirito Santo) and confronts a Portuguese, a Brazilian and a Lusophone African (too bad for Goa, Macau and Timor...). If the colonial question (which, it seems to me, the Portuguese culture had some difficulty in addressing) is omnipresent in the selection this year, it seems to me to represent in an obvious way (too obvious?) this tension between form and content, all three artists approaching it in radically different ways.

Edson Chagas, exhibition view

The first room, very dark, is devoted to the Angolan Edson Chagas, who we had seen at Venice two years ago: his piles of posters on the ground, in contrast to the splendour of the Cini Palazzio had earned the Angolan pavillon the Lion d'Or, perhaps more thanks to the relevance of the confrontation in this place than to the intrinsic quality of close up photos of abandoned objects. While Chagas testified in other works of his status as a diasporic African between North and South (read this beautiful critic of Roxana Azimi), he decided here to present a highly aesthetic work, whose intention however seems diluted. Six photographs and one video with exactly the same frame show a sandy beach (at the Cap Island in Luanda) by night, brightly lit under an ink-black sky; planted in the sand, wooden posts, remnants of basketball hoops. The texture of the golden sand is a composition abstract and vibrant of great beauty. In the video a man goes by trotting, and you hear the sound of the sea and nearby bars. In this dark room, each photograph is a gem of composition and light, pure and simple, mysterious and poetic; but beyond the relationship between man and space, one does not know what to say, how to articulate a speech, and must be content to admire the beauty of the images.

Ângela Ferreira, A Tendency to Forget, Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisboa 2015

One cannot imagine a starker contrast than the second room, dedicated to the Portuguese Angela Ferreira, born in Mozambique and whose whole work revolves around traces of Portuguese colonialism (recently noticed at the Ricard Fundation). The project presented here revolves around the "father" of the Portuguese ethnology, Antionio Jorge Dias, who, with his wife Margot Schmidt Dias, made several visits to northern Mozambique at the Makondé's, towards the late 50's and early 60's on behalf of the Portuguese Ministry of Overseas (Mozambique was a Portuguese colony until 1975 ). Dias was also the funder of the Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon. This museum is located near the old Ministry of Overseas (now National Defence) and Angela Ferreira built her exhibition on this "coincidence" that is not one, first by juxtaposing four photographs of one of the buildings and three of the other, and by building a small structure suspended, difficult to access, taking the form of the Ministry, where is screened her film "A tendency to forget".

Ângela Ferreira, exhibition view

This movie includes footage of life in Mozambique during the colonial era, and other sequences shot by the Dias at the Makondé's (with, curiously, the faces of the black blurred), accompanied by the reading of excerpts from Margot Dias' diary and of the political reports written by Jorge Dias at the Ministry. If the sequences from the news show an almost total separation between blacks and whites and the whites' carefree life at the colony, Dias texts illustrates remarkably the ambiguity of his mission (and probably of all colonial ethnography): indeed he had also been charged by the Ministry with the mission of gathering intelligence on the natives' anti-colonial activities; a mission which, it seems, he accepted without too much hesitations. If Mozambique's independence war only began in 1964, there were already some "disorders" back then and Dias denounced the "contamination" from Tanganyika (soon presided by Julius Nyerere), dangerous and subversive ideas, propaganda from Moscou and Cairo, while his wife naively indulges in racial physiology and wonders that natives refuse to be photographed. While we may wonder at this collusion between ethnography and colonialism, the colonial delay (this is at the time of the war in Algeria, of the independence of the English and French colonies, of the Bandung Conference...), it is hardly surprising. Moreover we would like to know more about Dias, his ambiguities (I thus discovered he spent the whole war in Nazie Germany) and his possible reticence. So Angela Ferreira presents here a very constructed speech, very political very consistent. But the form here disappoints: seven unfortunate photos of two buildings and an assembly firm are, in my opinion, not enough compared to what, in my opinion, could have been said and done on this dense and radical topic.

Ayrson Heráclito, exhibition view

After these two absolutely oppose examples of dissociation between discource and picture, between form and content, the third artist, the Brazilian Ayrson Heráclito (also here) succeeds in combining these two aspects and presents here a work that, in my opinion, is the only accomplished one of the three. In this third room, two sets face each other, one consisting of two diptychs (one in landscape and the other in portrait) and one video: a group relates to the Slave House in Gorée, the other to the Casa da Torre in Salvador de Bahia. From either side of the room, on both sides of the Atlantic, two emblematic places of slavery, trafficking, and, as told by the artist, of that other Holocaust. But to show is not enough: with two black acolytes dressed in white, the artist undertakes in each place a purification ritual, an exorcism, the "sacudimento" (riddling).

Ayrson Heráclito, O sacudimento da Casa da Torre, screen shot

Going from room to room, all three clean the ochre walls, stained, full of obscure traces with, in each hand, a bunch of leaves that they rub against the walls, and then (and the sound then changes) that they struck against each other towards the ground as to expel from them bad spirits. Each square centimetre of the walls of the two houses, the one assigned to the slave traders and the other to the colons, is cleaned in this fascinating ritual, from of which we cannot look away. Can we even purify? forgive? forget? The strength of this work comes from the fact that the relevance of the comment here is reinforced by the choice of images and the staging: stage design, diptychs, landscape and portrait formats, harmony between photos and videos, all the aesthetic contributed to the power of the speech. If I were the jury, my choice would be made...

Photos courtesy of the Berardo Museum

Guido Guidi

2015-07-05T11:21:00.002-07:00

Snowed under work I'm crawling my way out of it, slowly, mainly thanks to Guido Guidi's beautiful exhibition, From the Interior, at The Large Glass gallery. I'm utterly disorganised so the show is now over, but I managed to attend a discussion at the gallery between Guido Guidi (through Skype, since he was unfortunately unwell and had to stay in Italy), David Campany and Paul Hills.

Guido Guidi Preganziol (A2) 1983

At the centre of the exhibition: a series of photographs of small format that follow the evolution of light within a deserted house.
The first series of photos show a wall, with an open window on the right hand side. The frame is fixed, the same from one photo to the next, and at first we have the impression that the images are identic. But as we look closer, we see the light changing, with the vegetation outside appearing more clearly through the window and the light moving throughout the room, in the shape of a square cut by a line - the shadow of a tree.
Guido Guidi compares his approach to the seers in ancient Rome: like them he draws shapes in the air, although he does not read from them the future, or how the story ends.
Not knowing what the end will be is a constant in his work, almost a pre-requisite. Taking photographs, capturing the transformation of the light, this is the experience he is after, never knowing where it will take him.

Guigo Guidi, Preganziol 1983

Perhaps because they were also taken inside a building, this series is reminiscent of his work around the Brion family's memorial vault that was designed by one of his architecture professors, Carlo Scarpa. Although one is a masterpiece of architectural design and the other is a small isolated house, abandoned, inhabited by dried leaves and spider webs, there are similarities between both series - a calm, a silence, mysterious, contemplative and thoughtful.

With his work around Scarpa's building Guido Guidi feels he showed things that had until then not been seen, that were hidden.

And this is what he seeks with his photos, to unveil the beauty that is hidden. He explained how, when he started taking photographs, he liked the idea of working with a medium that was generally considered as vulgar.
He also spoke of a clock maker (I think) that said that Perspective's duty was to measure the world: for him, Photography inherited this duty, and everything is worth recording.
This idea of something vulgar - as in less noble - is linked for me to his choice of format for his photographs. Small, their scale is in line with the discretion, the softness and elegance of his photos, their secretive silence.
For Guido Guidi large scale photographs are for Museums. He wants his photos to be in the world and accessible, readable and personal like books, inviting us closer, intimate.

Like Paul Hills I was also reminded of Annunciations: the pale blue and pink of the walls, like old frescoes; the light from the window, entering the room like the Angel would; light and shadow creating a sort of separation between the real world and the spiritual one. Even the impression of something contemplative echoes the Annunciations, where Mary listens to the Angel but looks also within herself, thinking of that child to come, and of the one that is absent.

There is similarly something closed on itself in Guido Guidi's photographs. In the way he record the transformation of light within the house, the traces of time on its walls, there is something that eludes us and somehow keeps us out. Although there is obviously someone within the house (at least at the time the photos were taken), we do not feel any presence there. For Guido Guidi himself seems to disappear, through the mechanical use of the exact same frame, through the mathematical titles (A1, A2...).
And it is this ambivalence that makes these photos both contemplative and soft, and also closed on themselves and hidden, mysterious. When he takes a photo, Guido Guidi feels as if he is praying. You can only pray to what is not here. And this is what we are seeing here, what inhabits these photographs, this absence.

Guido Guidi, Preganzio C14, l983

Tension and freedom, pressured Bodies and mixed Cultures

2015-06-25T14:45:00.001-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 22 June 2015

Antoni Miralda, Santa Comida, 1984-89, various material, detail. Collection MACBA. Ph. M. Lenot

Under the title "Tension and Freedom", this exhibition at the Modern Art Centre of the Gulbenkian Foundation (until October 26) could be a reflection of the influence of the Iberian Peninsula's historical problems on art for a century - civil or colonial wars, dictatorships, return to democracy, economic crisis... - since it is the result of choices made from a curator in the CAM collections, but also from two Catalan institutions, the Caixa and the MACBA. It could be, and many will make of it a political reading, but it cannot be reduced to it, as it sometimes escapes it and moves away from it. And concepts of tension and freedom are at once too broad and too vague for them to impose a reading too unambiguous of the works shown here. So, preferring to take back road, I've preferred to use two ways of looking, one on the body, and the other on the confrontation of two cultures.

Bruce Nauman, Pulling Mouth, 1969

The body, first, is omnipresent here, and above all through the constraint applicable to it, the tension it undergoes much more than the freedom it could express. The first room shows seven iconic videos by Bruce Nauman (and some photographs and drawings) offering an historical overview of his work, at least until 1985, more faithful to his historical approach than his more recent Parisian show (some will say that his more recent works do not have the same strength, and I must confess I usually prefer his older works). If Good Boy, Bad Boy (1985) is the most iconic work, I liked the contortions that the viewing of the works imposed on the viewer who must bend for Violin Tune D.E.A.D., or even put his head down for Revolving Upside Down and glue himself to the wall for Walk with Contrapposto. But it is of course of Pulling Mouth that we will be reminded a bit later.

Samuel Beckett, Not I, 1973, single channel video, B/W, sound, 11’52 » movie, screenshots; MACBA collection

Later, when we will be facing Samuel Beckett's mouth, Not I, monstrous mouth, terrifying, consuming, just emerging from the darkness in which are immersed the head and the body of the woman who speaks, mother of all mouths, fascinating hole in which we look without being able to look away. We then have to pull ourselves from the surrounding hubbub, place exactly our body under the little speaker suspend from the ceiling being careful not to project our shadow on the screen, looking at it without getting distracted by anybody, trying to listen. The actress speaks really fast, her voice breaks sometimes in a laugh or a cry, her lips move continuously, like a machine gun, a vagina with teeth or mad sphincter. From this logorrhée springs, if we are attentive, the story of a trauma, the story of an old woman abandoned, almost silenced, alien to her own story, and her denial. At the end (or at the beginning, but it is better at the end) the actress Billie Whitelaw recounts her experience with Beckett.

Vasco Araujo, Mulheres d’Apolo, 2010, video, screen shot

If the viewer (at least the male viewer of a certain age) emerges form this projection room unscathed, he still has two trials to face. The first one is a movie by Vasco Araujo, Mulheres d'Apolo (Appolo's wives), located in a ballroom/ tearoom for senior citizens (Sociedade Filarmónica Alunos Apolo) where elderly women, sad, unhappy, loveless, dance, often alone, and confide their grief to the camera: we first see them dancing and we recognise them through their ornaments, they are filmed in close-up, with their faces outside out the frame, except for the last one, who is none other than the artist made-up. Notwithstanding Appolo's myth and the courage of Trojan women (with a quotation from Euripide on top of it) we are confronted here with a pathetic sentimental misery, where we recognise the artist's dark humour and sense for tragedy.

Mike Kelley, The Trajectory of Light in Plato’s cave (from Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile), 1985-1996, various material, La Caixa collection . ph. M. Lenot

Another trial, in the centre of the room, a large wooden container in which we enter, having to get on all fours, under a drawing encouraging us to do so: "in Speleology, sometimes you have to bend down, sometimes to walk on all fours and sometimes to crawl... Crawl, worm." Once in this dimly lit cave (by electric log fires) we are confronted with two fabric panels, the first being the schematic evocation of a vulva (and the cellar would be a vagina), the second juxtaposing the imprint of an Klein-like antropometry and a strange Rorschach of the same scale. It's a trace of a performance by Mike Kelley in New York in 1986. The Trajectory of Light in Plato's Cave, Rothko Chapel (one or two fabric panels vaguely reminiscent of the color, but it may as well be the colors of blood, urine, semen or crap) and the Lincoln's profile (on one cent coins). The happening had been set to Sonic Youth music with a text by the artist, but here no music, no words. A mysterious and disturbing room where my body, having crawled, finds himself alone with these disturbing shadows.

Gabriel Abrantes, Olympia 1 & 2, 2006 | 16mm transferred in HD Format 16:9, color, sound, 8’52’’| Collection CAM – Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian. Photo CAM's curtesy

Some works evoke here the body, this transgender revisit of the myth of Olympia by Gabriel Abrantes, the wall full of Roni Horn clown faces or the strange prosthesis (artist Archaeology) of Ramon Guillén-Balmes: always a suffering body, dominated by tension.

Ana Hatherly, Les rues de Lisbonne (Lisbon's streets), 1977 | Collage on paper and Platex 110 x 85 cm, detail | Collection CAM – Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian; Ph. M. Lenot

Freedom is perhaps what I perceived as the other aspect most present, where cultures meet and intermingle. When we are talking about political struggles after the Carnation Revolution, with a wall of torn posters from Ana Hatherly, my gaze stops on the juxtaposition of names of these two communist leaders as a reminder of an era that now seems so distant. When Angela Ferreira shows a new work on Mozambic, we find there, besides the presence of Jean Rouch, a letter inviting Jean Luc Godard to establish the first Mozambican television station in 1977/78 (without success): another unknown history gateways to explore.

Antoni Miralda, Santa Comida, 1984-89, various materials. Collection MACBA. Ph. M. Lenot

But the most powerful work is probably Antoni Miralda's huge altar, Santa Comida, where religious syncretism, visual combinations of Christian saints and orixás idols depending on how we look at them, diversion of statues and proliferation of candles, ointments, love sprays and of course (as always with Miralda) food. Between Bahia worship, Catholic Roma and Africa origins, plus a dose of North American consumerism, we find ourselves immersed in a wortex, as sensory as they are mystical.

Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 years without images, 2011

Finally we see again here with pleasure the Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 years without images of Eric Baudelaire, another story about passages (like all anabases), between two cultures, revolutionary Japan and occupied Lebanon and Palestine, but also a story of exile and roots, and, as often with Baudelaire, a question from the author and its disappearance; on the wall of the auditorium, these black images barely visible, traces of fugitives in exile hidden bodies.

The invisibility of black (Vasco Araújo)

2015-06-07T07:52:00.000-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 30 April 2015

Vasco Araujo, E nos sonhos que tudo comença, n°8, 2014, exhibition view, Demasiado pouco, demasiado tarde, CIAJG, Guimaraes, 2015 (ph. Susana Pomba)

On the walls, tropical wallpapers, bright colours and exotic patterns, palm trees and lush flowers. Or rather paintings that reproduce them faithfully, the admiring contemplation of which is disturbed by printed texts on the print - and it gets even more disturbing when we read them. Vasco Araújo, for whom exploring colonial and racist tensions in his country has always been one of his themes, carefully selected in two books some extracts particularly violent, white Angolan or Mozambican's speeches on everyday racism, on the violence against blacks, the inability to trust the natives, the two-speed justice, and, of course, sexual exploitation, rape and also of the masters' attraction for their young slaves. And these words, so natural, so obvious, appear on these walls in all their violence. The one shown here (page 72 of Cadernos de memórias coloniais de Isabela Figueiredo) said that white women are serious and never talk about sex and that, on the contrary, black women love to fuck and do not hide it, and that therefore everything is allowed ("Everything starts in the dreams").

Vasco Araujo, exhibition view, Demasiado pouco, demasiado tarde, CIAJG, Guimaraes, 2015

In the centre of the room, a table in exotic wood, an oval table, around which the settlers sit and discuss. And the violence of the words, inscribed on the walls, is engraved in the table itself. But here, within this domestic racism is also instilled fear, the consciousness of the theft of the land and the fear of revolts: "Sheet! One cannot always live in fear. We have to eliminate them all" (text from the book Yaka of the Angolan writer Pepetela). Racist and paranoid discourse common to all settlers who know well that history is against them, from Algeria to Angola, from South Africa to Palestine. And the piece is titled "Hell is not other people".

Vasco Araujo, O inferno nao sao os outros (detail), 2015, exhibition view, Demasiado pouco, demasiado tarde, CIAJG, Guimaraes, 2015 (ph. Susana Pomba)

And of course, while the Whites hold this discourse of contempt and rape, the Blacks are here, present and invisible: they serve at the table, they wash the clothes, they clean the floor, they care for the children, and they hear everything, in silence, without a word, letting the frustration and the desire for revenge fermenting inside them. In this exhibition at CIAJG in Guimarães (until 5 July) Vasco Araújo invited them and hid them, silent witnesses of these abjections. Here, they are under the table, hung upside down and their shadows dance on the floor; we have to crouch down to see them, but they are at the same height as the stomachs and sexes of the Whites seated at the table, sources of their misery in which, one day, they will plant their teeth.

Vasco Araujo, série Capita, 2012, exhibition view, Demasiado pouco, demasiado tarde, CIAJG, Guimaraes, 2015

Upside down too are the portraits of the black servants in the next room, "house negroes", well dressed, one with a white wig, another with elegant rimmed glasses, a third with a white bow tie. All these portraits are doubled, the one on the left presented in a photographic plate box form the 19th century, as an echo of the power of photography, its identification and repression roles of its judicial anthropometry. The representation, the image become here an instrument of everyday racism, and almost benevolent. All these aquiline heads ("Capita", almost certainly not an innocent title) look like each other and this for a reason: there are 14 times a self-portrait of the artist grimed in black, 14 times a reincarnation. And you, how would you have behaved then?

Vasco Araujo, The Girl of the Golden West, 2004, exhibition view, Demasiado pouco, demasiado tarde, CIAJG, Guimaraes, 2015 (ph. Susana Pomba)

One of the movies takes up the themes shown a few months ago at the gallery Andrea Baginski, dialogue between characters taken from Eduardo Malta's paintings, with this theatrical staging that characterises the artist. The other movie tells the story of Puccini's opera, The Girl from the Golden West, triangle between the woman, the sheriff and the bandit, but this story is told to us by a black matron dressed in white, filmed in close-up. The story, as seen through this prism, colour itself with modernity, and the life of this woman (from Texas), the racism she was victim of, her condition as a black woman from the South are reflected at every moment. She speaks of the way in which each character expresses human rights, a notion probably foreign to Puccini and his librettists; she evokes the Indian slaves and Mexican proletarians, and somehow, she transposes this story of the golden rush to the civil rights era. It is her moral that is reflected here, her wisdom, her conception of love and of the tension between means and ends, her vision of the world where no one is neither bad nor good. A few well-chose maxims punctuate the movie, expression of traditional Christian morality; my favourite is "No cross, no crown".

The rest of the museum is dedicated to the artist José de Guimarães after whom the centre is named: in the basement, his paintings and sculptures, the brightest of which date from his stay in the colonial Angola in the 60s, and on the upper floor his collection of African masks: perhaps was I the only one to see a touch of unintended irony in the gap between the "harvest" at the top, attempt at a multi cultural osmosis, and Araújo's exhibition, demonstration of its impossibility in front of colonialism and racism. Too little too late...

Photos of Susana Pomba (Miss Dove) and the artist

Berardo: a collection under tension

2015-05-31T03:43:00.003-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 20 May 2015

The setting of collections, whether public or private, are usually terribly predictable: well made, with a clearly stated line of thought that is usually ideologically abstruse, they create a careful balance between the works, with a well indicated path that is intelligently neutral and without surprises or emotions; indeed we often get bored a little while learning a lot. The Berardo Collection was no exceptions: art works often outstanding, a strong thematic organization, dense and intelligent explanatory notes and the feeling to revisit our Art History lessons on Contemporary Art, with interest of course, but studiously, very studiously.

Marc Chagall, Stage panel for The Magic Flute by Mozart, 1965, mixed media, 13.5×23.5m, photo David Rato

And then something happened: the collector himself, endearing personality, original and a little fanciful (if one can judge after spending two hours with him) - and who is moreover concerned about the future of his collection - decided, for the first time, to have fun not only collecting but also by setting up himself, instead of his respectable directors, four of the museum rooms (the rest is unchanged), ignoring all themes, all lessons, all didacticism, to put together works taken from the reserves, rarely shown, and that he particularly loves (until 29 September). Not simply lovely, and revealing of his preference for large formats, all this shows also his boldness, his ability to juxtapose works of unexpected origins, and, more importantly, that, in contrast to the pedants and the erudites, the museum must first be a place of fun.

Frank Stella, Severambia, 1995, mixed media on fibreglass, 300x841x389cm

For you must have, I am sure of it, a certain degree of audacity, recklessness and courage to blithely trample Bourrriaud and Pacquement's practices and put in the same room a sort of monster signed by Frank Stella, the base of which over more than 8 metres on the floor is rectangular and rigid, but which, above, raises and twists to 4 metre high, like a living wave that distorts itself, twists on itself and engulfs us in its organic pattern, colourful, both oppressive and flight-like, in the same room as a 23,5 metre high Chagall, element of a painted décor for a performance of The Magic Flute (the music of course accompanies us in our contemplation) at the Lincoln Centre in 1965, a profusion of vague shapes, floating, blurred, pierced by semi-precious stones sewn into the fabric. And surprisingly enough, it works! The feeling of slightly terrified admiration, of deep perception, almost animal, beyond reason generates an incomprehensible emotion, defying analysis, but so real.

Pedro Cabrita Reis, The Grid, 2006, acrylic on wood, 540x630cm; Pedro Cabrita Reis, Compound Group 13, 14 and 15, 2007, steel; Jörg Immendorf, Anbetung des Inhalts, 1985, oil on canvas, 285x330cm

And likewise, who would dare to confront the cold metallic brutality of Pedro Cabrita Reis, made of canvasses and sculptures, with the radical and wild excesses of the contemporary German expressionists, Penck, Baselitz and Immendorf, adding for good-measure, Schnabel and Basquiat? No sensible curator would find any intellectual justification for such a juxtaposition that only a collector prone to feelings and madness can digest. To create this tension between works demand more than just pure intelligence, it takes passion something so rare.

George Segal, Flesh Nude behind Brown Door, 1978, plainted plaster, wood and metal, 244x152x102cm

Elsewhere, a kind of couple in lead from Gormley and a duplicated man from Quinn speaks with the neo-classical Italians Clemente, Paladino and Cucchi. At the entrance a naked woman from Segal invites us to come in, towards a disturbing Monory and a beautiful Lichtenstein. A small journey under the sign of pleasure.

The Night of Assassins, a film by Jece Valadao, 1976, poster from Angel Facio, Os Comicós, Lisbon

The museum shows also a collection of posters from the Portuguese artist Ernesto de Sousa. The posters are fashionable in Lisbon, and are the object of an exhibition at Culturgest too. We find there the Nouvelle Vague and May 68, but also the Carnation Revolution, the Black Panthers and a slice of Portuguese theatre and cinema.

Photos 1 & 2 courtesy of the Museum. Photos 3, 4 and 5 form the author.

Taryn Simon and her very disquieting strangeness

2015-05-10T10:41:00.001-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 31 March 2015

Taryn Simon, Cutaways, 2012

Taryn Simon (at the Jeu de Paume, until 17 May) is an artist of the space between, the gap, the imperceptible difference between normality and madness. We are warned from the entrance when, in a short video, we see the artist in a Russian television studio, somewhat amazed, but obediently following the interviewers' instructions: remain silent and motionless for three long minutes "for the set up". This makes no sense, corresponds to nothing except as an allusion to the power of media, where for 15 minutes of fame, we are all ready, herself included, to do anything without question. Should we smile or worry? Thus introduced to this (remarkable) exhibition, should we approach it with a sly and distant air, or conversely with acute paranoia? I confess that I quite quickly passed from irony to fear, from light mockery to the disturbing anxiety in front of so much disquieting strangeness ("discomfort born from a rupture in the reassuring rationality of everyday life")?

Taryn Simon, Tim Durham, Tir aux pigeons, Tulsa OK, 2002

Denunciating miscarriages of justice and the weight of photographic identification, she photographed The Innocents (five black and two white children) in the crucial place that haunts them, the magnetic pole in their history (where the crime that they are innocent of took place, where they were arrested, where they were actually at the time of the crime...).

Taryn Simon, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Aesthetic surgery of Hymenoplasty, Ft Lauderdale FL, 2007

She shows the strangeness of unexpected places by playing on the gap between expectations and reality, between works of art and the fact that they belong to the CIA, between rotting corpses and the fact that they are actually objects of study for a forensic anthropology centre, between this operating room and the fact that we restore virgin hymens there (detail can be read here
as No 7), between gas cylinders and the fact that they are used to preserve corpses through cryopreservation, etc. This is her most famous series, the one most written about (including by Salman Rushdie in the catalogue) and they established her reputation as a fear discoverer. For these are indeed the most common fears that are brought out here, fear of power and espionage, nuclear fear, fear of genetic manipulation, fear of blindness, especially fear of death. No wonder Walt Disney refused to participate, whereas Simon had managed to convince organisations much more weary of advertising, from the CIA to KKK, from the Scientologists to nuclear power plants; but at Disney, as the text shown here tells us, they value the "magic charm" and the " dream time that invites escape" and they will not get involved in this disturbing demystifying approach.

Taryn Simon, Contraband,

Toothpast with cow dung (India)

(mad cow disease, 9.CFR.94.6),

2010

Accurate and comprehensive, Simon offers us two archives of the strange, one from her, the other is a story.
First she photographed contraband seized by US Customs (1), and these photographs are lined up on the walls of the last room, like an encyclopaedia, an archive; there are drugs in the broad sense, forbidden food (but no camembert...), counterfeits, parts or skeletons of dead animals, including a superb dried deer penis, Russian dolls with characters from Disney (just so...) and this rather improbable thing, a cow dung toothpaste... It is basically a portrait in hollow of America, its prohibitions and fears, its desires for purity and anguish for safety.

Taryn Simon, Picture Collection, Highways record, 2013

The other archive, amazing, almost morbid, obsessive, is that of the photographic collection of the New York Public Library, an incredible accumulation of pictures cut from newspapers or books, posters, postcards, ... ordered according to an absurd and poetic logic (swimming pools, financial panics, knots of highways, chiaroscuro, abandoned houses,...); they generally have little artistic value (were removed from the collection images of the FSA, for example) and are poorly documented (date, place, topic are mostly not or mis-informed). These are raw images, the only thing that matters is the pictorial story and their pre-Internet manic accumulation that is both ridiculous and touching.

Taryn Simon, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, chapter XI (Hans Frank), detail, 2011

Finally her series about families is both compelling and disturbing. Captivating when she tells us the story of families introducing to us all the family members linked to this common story, be it a Bosnian family victim of the Serbian massacres, or an Indian family dispossessed of its land as the chief of the family is falsely declared dead, or this Chinese family selected as a "model" by the authorities (the fifth family, Korean, is shown here as blackboards, result of Chinese censorship). The presentation, very cold and formal, of family members and some artefacts, is almost a judicial document. But I was disturbed by the fourth family presented here, that of a Nazi official executed in 1946 after being sentenced in Nuremberg (the detail of the objects in the image above are presented here under number 27): why should family members be subject to the public gaze by the power (very persuasive, as we have seen) of photographs, for reasons they are not responsible for? I was morally shocked by the voyeuristic indecency of this set: unlike other families shown here, there is no common family story, the few people shown (Simon could not persuade them all and a lot refused) only have DNA in common with their grand-father or uncle. Taryn Simon, who also likes to denounce power and inquisition, could be perceived here as their vigilante instrument, using the worst biblical curses: "you and your children shall be cursed until the tenth generation". Was I right to be a little paranoiac when entering the exhibition? The cruelty of my conventional ancestor will earn me a place in the registry of the accursed Simonian, alongside the grandchildren of Hans Frank. Too bad for this false note that is so out of place in her work.

There was also (over since 14 March) an exhibition of her late series, Birds of the West Indies, at the Almine Rech Gallery: the real James Bond (whose name Ian Fleming stole) was a distinguished ornithologist. In addition to a documentation on his research (including a letter in which he complains about the joke made to him because of the other James Bond) Simon presents on the wall ALL the birds (331) appearing in James Bond movies, sorted by date and place (two in Portugal, 1969), no matter how tenuous their image on the photogram of the movie. She also produced a book with the same title identifying women, cars and weapons that Bond (007) possessed.
She also has an exhibition in Cherbourg (until 31 May) that I have not seen.

Opening fragments, an exhibition of Estfania Peñafiel Loaiza at CPIF in Pontault-Combault, from 18 April

2015-04-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 10 April 2015

Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, un air d'accueil (a welcoming air), 2013 2015

Following the AICA award won last year, an exhibition of the work of the Franco-Ecuadorian artist Estfania Peñafiel Loaiza will open Saturday 18 April at the Photographic Centre of Ile de France in Pontault Combault (until 28 June). Practical information are here (especially shuttle to go there on 18 April at 2.15pm, book at 01 7005 4980). I hope many of you will come and visit the exhibition. For once, here is my blurb in advance of the show.

Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, préface à une cartographie d'un pays imaginé (foreword to a map of an imagined country), 2008

All Estfania Peñafiel Loaiza's work, through its various modes of expression (symbolic narrative, indexed or simply evocative) and through its various mediums (photography, video, installation, text, happening), demonstrates a consistency, as if each work was a fragment of a global work of art, of which we only see the inception, the keynote. The work talks of visibility and absence, history and memory, travel and territory, always with great simplicity and economy of means.

Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, un air d'accueil (a welcoming air), 2013 2015

Upon entering the exhibition we are struck by an absence, something is lacking, invisible inside a photograph; this is fact a migrant, a clandestine, who escapes thus the surveillance (un air d'accueil - top photograph and above). This withdrawal, this protection through invisibility, we will find them again with the faces of the anonymous, the without-grade, without-name, erased from newspaper photographs and preserved in small jars (Sans titre (figurants) - Untitled (extras)) (at the end of the post). Then, texts disappear, obscured by a dark soot through which fragments are barely legible (sous rapture - under erasure); another text, a chapter from the book Henry Michaux' journey in Ecuador in 1929, letter after letter disappears before our eyes only to stay better in our memory (préface à une cartographie d'un pays imaginé - foreword to a map of an imagined country) (above). And in front of this huge white wall, apparently devoid of any sign, we are caught in a trap of visibility, where what is shown is hidden, where an abstract line is rendered barely visible, like an imaginary beyond perception (mirage(s) 2. ligne imaginaire (équateur) - mirage(s) 2. imaginary line (equator)). This reflection on image and visibility underpins all of Estfania Peñafiel Loaiza's work from her first secret objects enclosed in wax fifteen years ago (collection de secrets - collection of secrets) to her more recent works.

Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, cherchant une lumière garde une fumée (looking for a light keep a smoke), 2007

Let's not be mistaken: this is not a purely formal research on the visible and the invisible, the latent and the manifest, that lead Estfania Peñafiel Loaiza, but for her such a research is inscribed in history, and thus in policy. This is a work about forgetfulness and memory here, from our refusal t see, and the artist's will to reveal fragments od history and its protagonists: illegal, anonymous, held in detention centres (les villes invisibles 3. l'étincelle (Vincennes 2008) - invisible cities 3. spark (Vincennes 2008)). What images remain from History? One hand tirelessly writes and erases stories, History, histories repeat themselves (angelus novus); elsewhere the artist rendered visible photographs through light itself, too strong or inactinic, photographs of Birkenau's Sonderkommando (fiat lux) or images of the riots in the suburbs in 2005 (cherchant une lumière, garde une fumée - seeking light, keep a smoke) (above), traces of a history that became impossible to watch.

Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, sismographies 3. entrenerfs, 2013

Her work however is not about destruction, but rather about deconstruction, transfer to a new territory where the remains of the image can subsist in another form: reliquaries of the extras preserving their remains' image from being erased, engraving of a sonogram in books covered in wax (sismographies 3. entrenerfs) (above), fugitive inscriptions on windows or tree leaves reflecting the history of a place, footprints of the palimpsest of the soil's "skin" or of the workshops of an old factory as traces of its past activity and traces of the present life (l'espace épisodique - the episodic space) or the cast of an old guillotine on a street of Paris (présent, imparfait - present, imperfect). These movements, these new places, their history and their culture form a frame crucial to Estfania Peñafiel Loaiza's work. It often raises question about places, maps, the journey from one to the other, be it the equator, the line of horizon or the view from a room in Beyrouth (a room with a view (mode d'emploi -manual)).

Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, sans titre (figurants - extras), 2009 2014

All this is magnified by her ability to juggle, to amaze, to shake up the views, in surprising ways. Without bombast and with deliberately modest means, she manages to forge strong ties and create a surprising look on thing. One of her exhibition could be held in a suitcase, another was accomplished by spreading prayers in a library books, and her happenings are often the staging of ideas simple but dramatically complex (thus the reading in reverse of the Constitution of her country (compte à rebours- countdown). The sobriety of her means reinforced the striking dimension of her thoughts on image and Memory.

Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, sans titre (figurants) - (extras), 2009 2014

A bereavement

2015-03-27T15:42:00.000-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 27 March 2015

Vandy Rattana, Monologue, 2015

The movie Monologue by Cambodian Vandy Rattana, shown in the basement of the Jeu de Paume (until 17 May), is a gem of sadness and memory. In Cambodia, as in other countries affected by "disproportionate disasters", how can one testify when traditional modes of historical narratives have become powerless? Of Vandy Rattana's sister we will know nothing, neither her name nor her age or how she died, probably in 1978; we will not know her face, even though we know that in their father's house, some drawings realized from rare photographs hang on the walls. We will not see the map that the father scribbled, or the roadmap, we will only have vague indications: "after the sign indicating the direction of the village of Phum Tda dek, there is Wat Tapon temple where we turn right. After the second street we turn on the left, and then again on the left, we arrive at the place from which we have to continue walking led by the village chief.

Vandy Rattana, Monologue, 2015 "I only hear the sound of the indescribable sound of their deep sleep"

The artist seeks the grave of his sister, or rather the place her body was buried: the mass grave has become a field, a dry rice field, with two mango trees that grew well sine 1978, fertilized by thousands of bodies buried there. The artist, born in 1980, has never known his sister, and his monologue is addressed to her in her absence. The film lasts 17 minutes, there are about forty shots, almost all identic: mango trees, the field, from close up, from far, the left hand side, the right hand side, with two or three inhabited shots (of women planting rice, of a farmer and his beef), nothing really.

Vandy Rattana, Monologue, 2015

He talks to his sister, first speaking to her tenderly sadly, "Why am I constantly thinking about you?", "Maybe you're my breath?", "We may forget you forever". Then he apostrophes her in a painful violence "Stop lying to me", "Stop crying", "Your voice will turn to stone".

Vandy Rattana, Monologue, 2015

Finally the artist enters the field, takes some soil in his hand, a piece of bamboo, a mango tree branch, that he will bring back to his parents, and they will not react.

This intimate grieving takes a universal resonance, not only for the victims of the Cambodian tragedy, but also for any death that we are unable to mourn.

Small catalogue with the script and a few lines of introduction by Curator Erin Gleeson. The exhibition is simultaneously at the CAPC in Bordeaux.

Monologue, 2015, Vandy Rattana. Video HD 16/9 colour, sound,, 18 min 55s
Co-production: Jeu de Paume, Paris; National Foundation for Graphic and Plastic Arts; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux.
Courtesy of the artist © Vandy Rattana, 2015
Images courtesy of the Jeu de Paume

Velázquez, painter of princes and jesters

2015-03-20T11:50:00.001-07:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 17 February 2015

Diego Velázquez, A man's hand, around 1630, 27x24cm (inscription Illmo. Senor / Diego Velázquez), current whereabouts unknown since August 1989

Of all the European kings, the one whose face is the best known to us, at any age, is undoubtedly Philip IV of Spain, and he owes this to one who was his almost exclusive painter for years, Diego Velázquez. On the occasion of the Velázquez year, and while waiting for his upcoming exhibition at the Grand Palais (from 25 March to 13 July), the Taschen editions have just republished, in collaboration with the Wildenstein Institute, a monograph (with catalog raisonné) of José López-Rey (first published in 1979-1981), updated by Odile Delenda. This is a huge book of over 400 pages in the format 39,5 x 29 cm, profusely illustrated with excellent reproductions, with many details of paintings on full pages (and only one set of folding pages, on the Surrender of Breda).

Diego Velázquez, length portrait of Philip IV, executed in 1623, reworked in 1628,
198 x 101,5cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

And thus, first, the King: between 1623 and 1652, 12 portraits of Philip IV remain (plus two that can only be seen through X-rays under later paintings), but it is certain that Velázquez painted many more, for he had the monopoly (the only exception was made before 1652, during Rubens' stay in Madrid from 1628 to 1629, since he had with Velázquez a joint workshop). Furthermore Velázquez' workshop has produced countless copies of these portraits, widely disseminated, and one of Velázquez' responsibilities was to approve (that is to say to censor or to modify) any other portrait of the King painted in Spain (p. 131). I will come back later on the situation after 1652. One must question the relation between the King and the painter: at first Velázquez is a painter's valet (paid the same wages as the King's barber), whose talent opened for him the doors of the Court and offered this unique opportunity to become, at 24, the official painter of the young king who, at 18, comes to the throne. Then, little by little, seems to settle between them, if not a friendship, at least a complicity: not only did Velázquez progress in the Court's apparatus, but the King often visited him, with a key to his workshop at the palace, and no doubt they talked at length during the sittings. Is it the man or the royal character Velázquez painted? If Bartolomé Bennassar considers that Velázquez painted the man and not the King, focusing on the human dimension of this pictorial relationship, the author, José López-Rey sees, on the contrary, the painter's will to transcend the human, to reveal the royal majesty, the quasi-divine in these portraits. The first portrait from 1623 (catalog raisonné 33, the Prado Museum) is known to us only through X-ray, because five years later Velázquez repainted it completely: according to the X-ray the first portrait was very natural, the face's flesh flabby, the chin round, the neck short, the countenance without nobility. The majestic portrait repainted that we can see at the Prado shows on the contrary a strong face, pointed chin, slender neck, all giving off the feeling of power and serenity. We know however that the King and the court were enthused by the first portrait: it is therefore not at his request that Velázquez changed it but rather to comply with his own vision of royal majesty, not by basic flattery, but by idealism one might say.

Diego Velázquez; Portrait of Philippe IV, bust, around 1652-1655, 69x56cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Without dwelling on all royal portraits here (another [35, Prado] of the king in armour, painted in 1625, was amended in the same way in 1628), let's go to the last portrait, of 1652 [115, Prado]. The king, who has no living male heir, is then very melancholy, preoccupied with death and his salvation; he blames himself for his conduct, his many bastards, his probable syphilis and his shortcomings as a monarch, the decline of the kingdom and the exhaustion and decline of this inbred race. As shown by his letters to the Abbess Maria de Agreda, he is irresolute and full of remorse. Velázquez, who was probably aware of these vicissitudes, does not want to see any of this: in this last painting he idealizes once more his King, hides his physical and moral infirmities, his double chin, his wrinkles, his old age and his depression. Perhaps this painting did not please, maybe Philip IV wanted on the contrary his portraits to reflect the flaws of his human nature, maybe did he revel in the representation of his torments. Still, Velázquez, during the eight years he has left to live, will not paint the King again (except in Las Meninas) abandoning his privilege of the monopoly: he lets his assistants and other painters make portraits of the ageing king, conform to the royal taste, but not to his own, as a mark of his anger, his disillusionment with this pre-eminence of the human over the majestic.

Diego Velázquez, The Infanta Margarita, around 1656, 105x88cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie

Next to the King, Velázquez painted the Court and the royal family, the family damaged by inbreeding (and who, after the death of the painter, will result in the feeble Charles II), this narrow-minded court, rigid, desiccating, bored and boring. There are only three portraits by him of the King's first wife, Elizabeth [1], who, they say, did not like him; three portraits of the second Queen, Marie-Anne, prim and austere in her farthingales, limp and without character. There are six portraits, all charming, of the Infant Charles Balthazar, frail hope of the dynasty, who died at 17, one of his half-brother Philip Prosper, of a dull sadness (the infant died at four), three of the ungrateful Maria Theresa and three of the pretty Infante Margarita with chubby cheeks and angelic [118, Vienna]. And of this he makes harmonious and pure paintings.

Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Juan de Pareja, July 1649 - March 1650, 81.3x69.9cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts

Further Velázquez painted several portraits of courtiers, and he was one of them: in addition to his paintins, he progressed, from responsibility to responsibility, until he became, in 1652, Grand Marshal of the Palace, with the charge to buy works of art for the King (excuse for his travels to Italy), and develop and decorate the royal residences (the last one was, in 1660, the Spanish pavilion on the Pheasant Island, for the wedding of Louis XIV and the Infanta Maria Theresa). Was it, as say Elie Faure (beautifully evoked here), a burden that prevented him to paint full-time, or, as claimed by José López-Rey, was it normal responsibility due to his proximity with the King? I would rather see in this the mark of his ambition: skilful courtier, he did everything he could to be promoted and eventually to become a member of the Order of Santiago (p.305-306), intrigues to obtain the support of the Holy See, false testimony of his friends, and finally, after various favouritism, obtaining the dispensation by the Pope of the certificate of nobility, which was very doubtful (Velázquez' father, Juan Rodrigues Silva, was of Portuguese origin, his grand parents settled in Seville after the takeover of Portugal by the Spanish in 1580). Velázquez' life seems rather smooth, all in the service of his art and his ambition. However one can note two "bumps", barely mentioned in footnotes in this book : husband of the daughter of his master Pacheco (who appears on the cover of the book [20, Prado], father of two daughters (one dead in infancy, the other wife of the painter Mazo), affected by many family mournings towards the end of his life, he had, as a meticulours palaeographic search (Jennifer Montagu in the Bulington Magazine) found out, an illegitimate son in Roma, Antonio born in 1651, during his second trip to Italy. Perhaps his insistence to the king (who refused him) to go back to Roma in 1657 was also motivated by love... This same search found that his assistant, Juan de Pareja, whom we already suspected of being a moor because of his features, was actually his slave and that he freed him, not in Spain, but in Roma in 1650, when he painted his portrait (107 Metropolitan) on the eve of making the portrait of Innocent X. As a slave, Pareja did not have the right to paint, and he did it secretly in Velázquez' studio and continued afterwards with some success.

Diego Velázquez, The Merchant of water in Séville, vers 1620, detail, London, Apsley House, Wellington Museum

Painter of princes, but also of madmen and fools: I think that, more so than in his formal and formatted portraits of the court and the royal family, it is in his portraits of men on the margins of society that Velázquez deploys the most his talent for the human and the natural. I like the ironic dignity of Aesop in tatters (88 Prado) and Menippe (89 Prado), I love the burlesque insolence of Calabezas (79 Prado) and Lezcano's haggard eyes (94 Prado), I love the bloated faces of the Drinkers (38 Prado). As Maria Zambrano says "He painted them as if they were gods, or, better yet, as beings through which the divine shined" and Velázquez does not need to force their natural truth to make them majestic. Much earlier, but in the same vein, are his bodegones from Seville, where, as a young painter, he is already focusing on the appearance of things, on the materiality of painted objects and on the truth of beings of flesh and blood in the quiet scenes of gargotes with characters as ordinary as the décor. In this detail of the Merchant of water in Seville of 1620 (13, Apsley House, Wellington Museum in London; the painting was stolen by Joseph Bonaparte and then recovered by the Duke of Wellington, to whom the King Ferdinand VII offered it in thanks), the fig in the glass and the three drops of water oozing out of the pitcher sign one of the first masterpieces of the painter.

Diego Velázquez, Rokeby Venus, around 1644-1648, 122.5x177cm, London, National Gallery

Of course there would still be much to say about the beautiful spears of Breda (the only painting in history with The Expulsion of the Moors, lost) (71, Prado), on the eroticism of Rokeby Venus (with Goya, almost the only painting with a female nude in the Spanish prudish art, but he word "erotic" does not appear in this book. This especially inspiring painting was initially suspended on the ceiling of the Marquis del Carpio's bedroom, grand son of the Count-Duke of Olivares, first protector of Velázquez, and was damaged by the Taliban-like attack with a chopper from a feminist suffragette in 1914) (101 National Gallery); on the power, cunning and hardness of the Pope Innocent X (penetrating portrait that, weirdly, delighted the Pope) (109, Gal. Doria Pamphil, Roma) and on the implicit architecture and the profound meaning of famous Las Meninas (which the author insists on naming Velázquez and the royal family) (119 Prado).

Book cover of Velázquez, the complete works, Taschen, 2014

But let's go back to the book itself, wonderful book to which we can nevertheless do a few critics, starting with its hagiographic tendancy. In light of other writings on Velázquez, we would have liked some views more critical on both his life (and in particular his ambitions as a man of the Court) and his work (and in particular his idealization of the royal figure) and perhaps less emphasis on his religious paintings, which are mostly disappointing: how can so many admirative lines be dedicated to the horrid Immaculate Conception [8, London National Gallery], Sulpician before its time (a joyless copy says Elie Faure, an arranged composition?) To question some biases of the authors would not be diminishing the scholarly work and the quality of the catalogue. I would also have liked to find an echo of Elie Faure's theories, according to whom Spain only started generating great artists, Cervantès and Velázquez, at the time when its political, economic and geographic expansions were stopped, and that it is the decline of the empire that allowed this explosion of geniuses (El Greco is the exception but he was not Spanish). Finally I would have liked more distancing: instead of mentioning Michel Foucault's reflections on Las Meninas, a more elaborate analysis of his ideas, and beyond the obligatory mention of Manet ("Velázquez, painter of painters") and some lines on the Impressionists, a study of the way in which Velázquez was a crucial influence for so many other artists in the XIX and XX centuries, from Manet to Bacon and Picasso. But it remains a wonderful book.
A brief explanation on the first reproduction above: Velázquez signed few of his paintings, four only, two of which have disappeared (note 85, p398). It is ironic to have this little piece of painting where ony his signature can be seen and nothing else (54, current location unknown since August 1989).

Thanks to Taschen for this book.

Food and pleasure

2015-03-04T14:45:00.002-08:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 16 February 2015

Eduardo Srur, Supermercado, 2014, installation and video

As we enter this exhibition on supermarket gondolas filled with groceries, we expect both the worst and the best: this installation by Brazilian artist Eduardo Srur makes us smile and think - a little - (video monitors on the shelves show various liquids, flours and other being spread on his body). Ok, so we're going to talk about the critique of consumer society, one more time, and some other works at the exhibition Food, at the MUCEM until 9 March, are going to dwell on this rather tired topic, the worst (the most obvious, more vulgar) being the one by Claire Fontaine that buys soda cans from homeless men that they have collected to resale to recycling: as often with this duo we fall in the well-meaning banality.

Joseph Beuys, Wine F.I.U., 1983, ADAGP

Fortunately, fortunately, most of the works in this exhibition - that is focused more on contemporary art than on the museum's ethnological collection - cleverly distance themselves from this too basic criticism. Some, while staying in this economic field, are more relevant, as this wine box (and also a barrel of olive oil), witness of Joseph Beuys' work with farmworkers in a domain in Abruzzo, or this installation of jute bags and sunflower seeds by Janis Kounellis, two key ingredients of the international food trade.

Nari Ward, Transtranger Café, 2012, installation

More interesting are the works inspired by the social ties around food, the most notable being undoubtedly this cybercafé by Nari Ward, where, among the stained cups and saucers, both work stations face each other but where we see, on a second screen, what the other is looking at on internet, as a rejection of selfishness and of Selfies: a great simplicity and a great strength, as always with Nari Ward. Another beautiful work linked to the social ritual of food is a photograph by the Moroccan Ymane Fakhir, showing a young girl trying to mirror herself in an oil plate to read her future in it.

Antonio Miralda et Dorothée Selz, traiteurs coloristes, pains colorés, 1968, 45x60x10cm, collection Mina et Jacques Charles, ADAGP, ph. Nicolas Fussler

Irony is not absent, as with these colourful rolls, resulting from the collaboration of Antoni Miralda and Dorothée Selz, that are reminiscent in a way of some other works: all the Eat Art, from Meret Oppenheim (but not Feast) to Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth and Gordon Matta-Clark.

Caganers, collection Antoni Miralda

We cannot resist to the pleasure of showing two santons from Antoni Miralda's collection of caganers, Picasso and the French President side by side, in a window where Miralda, in connection with his proposed Food Cultura, has combined his own collection with a selection of objects extracted from the MUCEUM's huge collection, amazing table-bells and caricatural pitchers. Four other artists have done the same, with more or less success, the most interesting being probably the staging and tension of plows, drills and other tools by Barthélémy Toguo.

Vivianne van Singer, Envies, le voglie delle madri, 2012, installation

Come the end of the exhibition, we have been thinking, questioning ourselves and been angry, we have laughed, but we've realized that the "pleasure" dimension of food, the taste, gluttony, appear to have been removed from this exhibition. And it's a pity: there would have been so much to say and show on the enjoyment of eating and drinking in moderation or excess, whichever. Only one work alludes to it, the Swiss-Italian artist's Vivianne van Singer, titled Envies (Desires): a white table cloth, strawberries looking succulent and some chocolate that surely is delicious, we are starting to salivate. The table cloth is stained with red, brown, spots with well marked contours. Everyone knows not to refuse anything to a pregnant woman, her desires, strawberries, or milk chocolate, should be immediately met. Not to satisfy them would be running the risk of seeing a baby born with "desires", an indelible stain on the skin, red or brown, which would remind that which the mother could not have. Traces of unfulfilled desires.

Stefanos Tsivopoulos, History Zero, 2013, video

Elsewhere in the MUCEUM the colour photographs by Raymond Depardon, already seen at the Grand Palais and enriched by some taken in Marseille, and the excellent installation (until 13 April) by Stefanos Tsivopoulos already seen in Venice, on money, 32 alternative, virtual and utopian currencies, with, in these three videos, the circulation of goods between the immigrant who collects, the artist dressed in black who gathers images filmed with his tablet, and the old collector in flowered kimono who destroys her bank bills by making origamis: what has value?

Photos Miralda-Selz and Tsivopoulos curtesy of MUCEUM; other photos by the author.

On the way to the end of the world....

2015-02-07T14:56:00.003-08:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 05 February 2015

Of the couple Denatico and Lain we expect, based on past works, to foresee a little what we will see at their next exhibition, in this case at the Vera Cortês Gallery (until 7 March), stories of stars and of typography, of time and of alphabet, of image and of transmutation.

And naturally, while remaining in the same field, this exhibition is full of surprises. Besides the expected stars, whose names were translated in concentric circles, other constellations see their names displayed in horizontal strata reminiscent of Alighiero e Boetti's grid, with the letters shaping the celestial map. There are always several ways inside their works, the name, the plan, the intensity (of weight or light), the distance, like an equation with multiple unknown parameters offered to our insight.

In another room, the words of a text about clouds are transformed into fluffy clouds in a video that make them pass slowly, at the breath of an eastern wind, at variable speeds whose scrolling (temporal) creates a (spatial) perspective.

A dry Japanese garden comes alive on the screen simply thanks to a pixel selection software; rocked by a throbbing music, this vibrant video recreates there a space for meditation or prayer.

The most powerful work in the exhibition at first seems very simple: 24 paintings, from the whitest to the darkest, those at the centre populated by a chaos of Greek letters. Not much it seems, except that what is disassembled here is the book of the universe, the history of the world; each letter corresponds to a star, and the letter indicates its brightness, from the α to the ω. From picture to picture, like a Eames-like zoom, the font of each letter changes, from 1000 in the first painting, completely white included as it is in the original α here gigantic, to the font 1 in the last one, where the letters are so tiny they become invisible to the naked eye, where the stars are off, when the light is gone, when the world comes to an end. With extremely simple elements, with a great economy of means, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have made here a particularly powerful piece, quite emblematic of their approach.

Defining Art Brut?

2015-02-01T10:58:00.000-08:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 26 January 2015

Several exhibitions around Art Brut nowadays, and always this concern for definition, for categories, including or not: is this categorical obsession stronger in a field in search of legitimacy (now that even ArtPress come to it...)? I do not know but this certainly affects one's vision.

Abcd collection at La Maison Rouge, exhibition view, ph. Marc Domage

At La Maison Rouge, that exhibited until 18 January the Abcd collection, while trying to orient myself, I realized that I am more sensitive to parts that have some historical roots, rational, linked to language, to mathematics, to mapping or encyclopaedia. Works where, for me, the main interest is not in the work itself but in the artist's tormented life and the circumstances in which it was made, seem to me if not less interesting, at least less relevant in aesthetical term, in artistic questioning: if I'm looking at them without knowing who made them or how, then I see them quickly, with a passing glance. I was actually quite struck during my visit to see the relatively deserted showrooms while the rooms projecting short movies relating the life of these artists were absolutely crowded.

Abcd collection at La Maison Rouge, exhibition view

Of course I saw again with pleasure Dan Miller's works around language, Horst Ademeit's Polaroids, Zdenek Kosek's weather maps and Jean Perdrizet's logical machines, and of course Henry Darger, and many others, I will not deny my pleasure. But, for example, in front of Judith Scott's sculptures (suspended in the photograph above) would I be interested if I knew nothing of her and her disabilities? Is it prowess I admire, or her work?

Albert Moser, A Panoramic View of a mural on side of a building at a parking lot and 12th street, Philadelphia, PA, June 2005

As for the inclusion of photography in Art Brut, that the room booklet defines "the obsessive repetition of the same themes", I am obviously not fully in agreement: repetition is only a secondary factor, what matter is, first, the choice of topics (and the staging of portraits of his wife by Eugene von Bruenchenheim or Morton Bartlett's dolls) and especially the rebellion against the standard photographic process (thus Albert Moser's panoramas). And I really do not see why Tichý was included in this exhibition, it's like being back to the psychiatrist Buxbaum's vain attempts at including him to Art Brut in 1989, by erasing all the latest research on his work. well...

La mère François

Petra Werlé

Marc Giai-Minet

Peter Keene

Another exhibition, part of António Saint Silvestre and Richard Treger's important collection in the old Oliva factory at São João of Madeira, south of Porto. The exhibition is careful to distinguish Art Brut (first floor, curator Christian Berst) and singular art on the ground floor: here too a matter of definition (and again Tichý in Art Brut...) with also rooms dedicated to free representation, others to contemporary Haitian art. And here are a few gems. Here, lets favour crucifix, like the one, hallucinating, of Mère François, the one, in bread and under a glass, of Petra Werlé, and Marc Giai-Minet's complex assembly of books, furniture and machines. And also Peter Keene's electric metronome.

Paul Amar, ST, 100x165x28cm

Paul Amar

One rooms is devoted to Paul Amar's installations, made of painted shells and corals, covered with nail polish and other substances, that form a baroque and dazzling universe. (By the way notice how the websites of these marginal artists are very well done).

Peter Saul, Napoléon, 1995

Even free representation painters take here an hallucinating quality. And we go from room to room, in the middle of these invented worlds. [I had written a longer text on this but a "maintenance" operation by Le Monde.fr to create a new layout bugged: the backup of my text failed and he disappeared: so many issues with this site... I did again as best I could, only shorter.]

aerial view 1948

I end with the visit of a place where the Art Brut collection is modest (here from 3'15'', I would nevertheless name Jaime Fernandes) but the place itself is extraordinary. In the disused Lisboan hospital Miguel Bombarda (named after one of the pioneers of Portuguese psychiatry, who was unfortunately killed by one of his patients the day before the day on which he planned to lead a revolution to overthrow monarchy), the security pavilion was created in the late 19th century according to the plans of Jeremy Bentham: it is one of the very rare psychiatric panoptic in the world, even if the central tower has since disappeared.

Security Pavilion

Its modernist architecture (from José Maria Nepomuceno) is characterised by a purity of lines, economy of forms that seem to announce the Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright. This is a place that is rarely open, little visited and quite amazing. Javier Tellez's movie, Dürer's Rhinoceros was shot here, as well as a sequence of Memories of the yellow house (from 1h44' to 1h52') by João César Monteiro.

Maison Rouge photographs taken by Marc Domage, courtesy of Maison Rougel photos of Paul Amar courtesy of Oliva Creative Factory; photos of the security pavilion from the sites indicated in the links; photos of the crucifix and Peter Saul from the author.

In the sewing machines factory

2015-01-24T08:52:00.000-08:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 22 January 2015

One hour south of Porto, in an old sewing machines factory, an art centre hosts two very interesting collections recently placed on deposit there, Norlinda and José Lima's contemporary art one and Richard Treger and Antonio St Sylvestre's collection of singular art and Art Brut (of which I will speak in a future post). Incidentally, a striking thing in this country are the number of good sized collections housed in public (as here) or private places.

Dan Graham, Model, 2011 and Ana Cardoso, Monologic, 2010

The Lima collection is of course rather eclectic, with international artists as well as Portuguese ones, established or emerging, and the current exhibition happily focuses on discoveries rather than consecrated artists, although the classification of each room (due to the Curator Miguel Amado) is not always convincing. While we start with the coldness of an ethereal glass and aluminium model by Dan Graham, presented on a pedestal, it is surrounded by the vibrations of eight large monochromes on raw cotton by the young artist Ana Cardoso: a reflection on the canvas as object alongside a reflection on the volume.

Mafalda Santos, Showall, 2009, and Isabel Simoes, ST, 2008-2009

A little further, two paintings by two young Portuguese artists are affixed next to each other: on the left Mafalda Santos, whose wall made of paper and bathed in light I had already noticed (who recently showed equally geometric compositions at the Presença gallery), revisits here the topological and colourful structuring of a cold, linear and rigorous space. On the right hand side Isabel Simões (who also participates in strange bodily happenings) offers more fluid, translucent shapes, shimmering and oblique: it's a bird's eye view of her studio floor, deformed by an abstracting perspective, empty of all presence, where objects are only ghost-like traces, surrounded by a white void, in front of which the viewer is uncertain, shaken, suspended. Two fairly typical examples of a Portuguese contemporary art often concerned with space and its perception.

Carlos Noronha Feio, 3 2 1 0 A A and Away 1 2, 2011

More political and more rooted in reality is the work of Carlos Noronha Feio, also in his thirties: a huge carpet from Arraiolos filled with war-like symbols, planes, bombs, tanks, swastikas, whose production is reminiscent of Alighero e Boetti and comic books. At the opposite, a beautiful room pure and coherent of Francesco Tropa around the pyramid.

Marta Maria Perez bravo, Proteccion, 1990

Of the Cuban Marta Maria Perez Bravo, whom I had already admired

for her mystical and sensual violence, this photograph of a woman-rose with thorns, untouchable, unrapable, un-caressable, un-lovable.

Daniel Barroca, 5 Obstructed images, 2011

The room dedicated to war presents, in the middle of works that are a little simplistic (furniture transformed into weapons, swords into cart) an installation by Daniel Barroca that is very exciting: a table with photographs of colonial soldiers drinking beers, eating a roasted pig (I think). No war violence, just a moment of rest, a joyous instant to forget the horrors of the "judas ass" perhaps. But each of the twenty soldiers is rendered invisible by a glass blackened by soot, standing on their face (and on the pig too for that matter); each of the colonial soldier is obliterated, returned to darkness, erased form History. Perhaps it is the soot from the Guinean village they have just burned, perhaps it is the premonition of their coming ashes. Perhaps one of them is the artist's father, or he has taken the photograph and the son desperately tries to exorcise those memories as a people tried to do after 1974: the topic here is memory and legacy.

And it is what makes this exhibition interesting that is it not a mere stooge of the collection (that also includes Beuys and Nan Goldin, Barceló and Combas, Damine Hirst and Rauschenberg) but enables the discovery of these young Portuguese artists who, all of them, raise interesting questions.

Photos Carlos Noronha Feio curtesy of the Oliva Creative Factory; other photos of the author.

Trap for a voyeur (Miroslav Tichý)

2015-01-22T12:01:00.004-08:00

You can find here an English translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 19 January 2015

a sculptural ultrathin

2015-01-17T11:35:00.002-08:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 07 January 2015

Francisco Tropa, Tesouros Submersos do Antigo Egipto, exhibition view, 2014

The title makes one hesitate: "Sunken Treasures of Ancient Egypt". But then, because one previously liked the place (where we find again the iconic white peacock), and the artist's name evokes some souvenirs, at the Palais de Tokyo and Venice, one still goes to see, at the Museu da Cidade, Francisco Tropa's exhibition (until 22 February) and remains there more than an hour.

Francisco Tropa, Tesouros Submersos do Antigo Egipto, exhibition view, 2014

This is (mostly) sculpture, but it above all a strange voyage, almost initiatory, a mythological mystery, a mystical and symbolic journey, disconcerting and disturbing. There seems to be an Egyptian tomb, some plans, pure shapes, symbols n the middle of which we are lost (partly due, it is true, to one's inability to understand correctly the room's explanations in Portuguese).

Francisco Tropa, Tesouros Submersos do Antigo Egipto, exhibition's view, 2014

Alchemy of gold and lead, magic made of glass bulbs lit up from a cavern, objects made of wood and brass, complementary forms omnipresent, male and female, empty and full, negative and positive, sensitive and thought: we feel we are witnessing the creation of a world, the construction of an Original magic, before which one can only remain silent, stunned. This is a sculpture that is part of a story, a myth rather than floating alone in an ether of pure abstraction, and it makes it much more interesting; we come out of it with an appetite a desire for more familiarity with these enigmatic pieces.

Photos from the author

Felicia Bolm (1988-2011)

2015-01-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

Translation of Lunettes Rouges' article dated 27 December 2014