samadhi samba

I am from the days when one valued that cliché of semiotics that we called, what a lark,“floating meaning” (taken from Barthes and other such sneaky rascals!).

I like to keep my distance, without an aestheticising elegance either of an intentional art (O, realm of the obvious and the coded!) that stands on tiptoe in supposedly “political” or “poetic” explanations (note the inverted commas!), or of those inebriated by the ineffable and the roast sardines of the sublime (as art, the sublime has been bluff and rhetoric, from Caspar David Frederich to Rothko, and if possible beyond the latter).

I prefer warmer, less gloomy and more tantric versions.

The exhibition is not thematic (to Hell with half-baked themes!), but is climactic. It is called Samadhi Samba because I am a devoted practiser of yoga (practice above all else, the rest is idle chat, or just idle!) and also because the imaginary Indies have been beating (drumming?) in my blood since my tender childhood days.

Large scale drawings, paintings(I would not go without this experience!) and somewhat sculptural installation counterbalance my previous exhibition at Lisboa 20, in which I scratched away at more immaterial and chaotic situations (via scanner) with a photographic appearance.

The problems of the spaces are smuggled from medium to medium, but their fleeting coupling is diverse, and the nuptial spume is what is seen here. Chattering, emotion, backchat,murmurings, or as might be said by (see below) A. L., “apathy, trance, euphoria, revolt,anguish, serenity, etc.”

I feel like calling up some travellers – Álvaro Lapa because the body, life, literature (and theory, even pretending that it isn’t) and other things are inseparable from that which we stubbornly call art (with a post-Nietzschean joy that is stronger and more aware that that of the Greeks); Marcel Broodthaers because he waves to me with an experience within an irony beyond irony; James Lee Byars and his occasionally performing and then sculptural pythagorism (but corrected in an ultra-profound version (sod transgression, it is an adolescent thing!), more and more deepening a “porno-ecology” in complexity (what is this?)); and also Richard Tuttle, for his kindness and captivating scruffiness.