print October 2006

“Neobarroco”/João Pedro Vale

Exhibited as part of the group show “Neobarroco” in São Paulo along with works by Camila Sposati and Friederike Feldmann, the most recent large-scale sculpture by the Portuguese artist João Pedro Vale, Foi bonita a festa, pá (The Party Was Beautiful, Yes), 2006, was constructed from a jangada, a balsa raft from the northeast of Brazil. This craft seems particularly appropriate to its situation in this gallery, the work of Paulo Mendes da Rocha (winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize), who has created a long, narrow, very high nave, much like an overturned boat.

Let us examine the metamorphoses and

print May 2006

Vasco Araújo

Let’s begin with a question: What might one have done to induce an apt mood for viewing Vasco Araújo’s recent show “L’inceste”? My recommendation: Listen to Mozart and read the Marquis de Sade. For “L’inceste” was a contest between reason and perversion, elegance and corruption, good and evil. And the only rules of the game are those that determine the theatrical power of staging and interpretation. The show was composed of ten works spread over three rooms in Lisbon’s Museu Nacional do Azulejo (National Tile Museum). The dialogue between the traditional pieces on permanent exhibition and

print May 2005

James Coleman

James Coleman’s show combined a retrospective dimension—ranging from the historic Pump, 1972, and Playback of a Daydream, 1974, to mature works like Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94, and Charon (MIT Project), 1989, an extraordinary reflection on the nature of photography as a medium and the complexity of its aesthetic and sociopolitical role in contemporary life—with the premiere of a new work, –horoscopus, 2004–2005. Two television monitors placed side by side showed people engaged in conversation. Sometimes one image took up the entire screen, usually in close-up. At other times the screen was split

print December 2004

Jarbas Lopes

Carioca is the familiar term for inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro and an adjective associated with time-honored manifestations of Brazilian popular culture like Carnival and the samba. But the word also signifies a kind of open, sensual, pleasure-oriented conviviality. It is this type of congenial social and cultural experience that has set the tone of A Gentil Carioca since it opened in 2003 in one of the city’s typical working-class neighborhoods, a zone of traditional small businesses, originally Arab and now with a strong Chinese presence. Merchants and buyers mingle at the doors of an endless

print September 2004

Helena Almeida

“Pés no Chão, Cabeça no Céu” (Feet on the Ground, Head in the Clouds) encompasses thirty-five years of work in which, between the studio floor and the blue sky, everything passed through the body of Helena Almeida. In the ’60s the artist began questioning the material and conceptual elements that constitute the definition of painting. In the ’70s she abandoned traditional modes of depiction to undertake an array of practices whose point of departure is her own body. It all begins “inside me”—“Dentro de Mim,” as the title of a series of photographs from 2000–2001 says—not in the psychological

print May 2004

“Other Alternatives”

Subtitled “New Visual Experiences in Portugal” and gathering works by twenty Portuguese artists under the age of thirty-five, this exhibition confirmed the vitality of the Portuguese artistic scene. It took place in Galicia, a border region with close ties to Portugal. MARCO, housed in a former prison constructed on the model of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, invited the viewer to begin at its center, where Joana Vasconcelos’s A noiva (The Bride), 2001, was situated. A chandelier fifteen feet high and over seven feet in diameter hung from the ceiling, dropping to a mere eight inches from the floor.

print Summer 2003

“Cardinales”

Seldom does the inaugural show of a new museum so effectively bring together the very concept of exhibition with the architecture of the institution itself and its historical and social place in the city. The former prison that today houses the MARCO was constructed along the lines of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. Some of Bentham’s plans were presented in the exhibition, and they illustrate the panopticon’s basic principle, which is the organization of space around a central zone to afford the optimum capacity for observation and control. This structure was preserved in the remodeling of the

print May 2003

Antonio Murado

Before a landscape painting, we ask ourselves, “Looking at this, what do I feel?” This question is inherited from the traditional manner of contemplating a painting, but it also comes to us from the culturally determined manner of experiencing a landscape—that is, under the aegis of such philosophical categories as the sublime.

On first seeing Antonio Murado’s recent landscape paintings, I asked myself, rather, “Where have I had this feeling before?” Images of real, filmic, and pictorial landscapes ran through my mind, many of them similar to those that in childhood were nurtured by reading

print May 2002

Atom Egoyan / Julião Sarmento

What was so fascinating about Exotica (1994) the film that for many of us marked the discovery of Atom Egoyan, was the way that it enticed you to get dose, as close as possible, to let yourself be suffocated by the proximity of the voice of the flesh, without being able to touch any. This was the secret behind the film’s strip-club atmosphere. I remember the enthusiasm with which Julião Sarmento spoke to me of Exotica after he’d seen it for the first time. Years later, that enthusiasm would bring the two artists together in a collaboration included in the 2001 Venice Biennale: the video installation

print November 2001

Adriana Varejão

The fine color gradations that enliven the apparent chromatic uniformity of Adriana Varejão's Ruina de charque—Portugal (Jerked-beef ruin—Portugal; all works 2001), or the delicate mesh that furrows its surface, might seem to evoke the traditions of Minimalist or monochrome painting. It is thus tempting to discuss the Brazilian artist's work in terms of the history of modernism and the possible significance of its survival. A more attentive look, however, shows us that this is not a strict exercise in abstract painting, but rather the representation of a surface clad in tiles. The

print September 2001

Rui Chafes

Sintra, on the outskirts of Lisbon, is known as a magical place—or at least a place with a romantic atmosphere. Here, Rui Chafes's sculpture was displayed in three quite different spaces: one outside a traditional museum space, the Colecção Berardo, which houses a collection of twentieth-century art; outdoors, as well, at the Parque da Pena, an enormous garden with ponds and man-made grottoes where the sculptures were placed in direct relation to the landscape's natural and artificial elements alike; and, finally, the interior spaces of the Palácio da Pena, created (as was the park) in the

print January 2001

Efrain Almeida

The installation of new works (all 2000) by the young Brazilian artist Efrain Almeida, mounted in the gallery mezzanine, played on the symmetry between works shown on two facing walls. From each of these sprang two wooden hummingbirds captured as if in full flight, their wings spread. From their feet hung long strings of red beads that fell to the floor and stretched out to the center of the gallery. These small ligaments, uniting each pair of birds, traced red outlines on the gallery floor: two drawings that nearly touched, as if describing the shadows of a flight in which the birds, affixed

Alexandre Melo