In this exhibition, the heroes of popular culture serve as a springboard for the displacement of narrative and meaning in the mordant and surrealist works of António Salvador Carvalho. Batman, Brian Adams, or National Geographics, epithets of global popular culture, are reduced (or enlarged?) to figurines of a sort of Chinese theater of shadows, defenseless puppets in the face of the absurd nature of reality.

Pedro Zamith, in line with what he’s been doing for some time now, transposes well-known heroes and anti-heroes from the Fantastic, Black and Horror Cinema (Barton Fink, or the ghosts of the Grady twin sisters murdered in the movie The Shining) into drawing paper and painting canvas. We are, therefore, facing a typical manifestation of postmedia art, an extension of the concept of ‘post-internet art’. Almost without exception, today we have access to culture, or rather, entertainment, through technological retinas, transparent or opaque, through which we access the electronic emergence of images. This way of feeling what we see has neither matter nor color nor smell, and its images have all the same fleeting immaterial nature. We do not need to memorize them because we can access them whenever we want. By bringing these zombies to canvas and paper, Pedro Zamith fulfills the desire to materialize creatures that burn at the slightest friction, or otherwise they will end up in the temporary or definitive trash of any cell phone, television or laptop that suddenly lacks electricity.

Finally, Guttguff is a daughter of the Internet. The small drawings of António José Carvalho gradually migrate to the digitization, and then to Instagram. In this social network, the drawings gain scale and aura. Their sharing with the world is immediate, and the feedback is as well. What once seemed so difficult – finding someone who would edit his drawings, or that would get them exposure – became an extension of the drawing itself and its author, through digital dematerialization and electronic transport. We are, once again, in the presence of a typical ‘postinternet art’ situation. What was on the computer, or on the smartphone, returns to the material reality! But unlike his twin brother and Pedro Zamith, along with equally repeated references to the world of popular media culture, the stories of this pseudonym of António José Carvalho are more autobiographical and intimate. They are dominated by a kind of narrative hallucination populated by acid humor, where the image of things and meanings originates in any anarchy of paradoxes.

—

Opening: June 22, 19h

Patent from June 23 to July 21, 2017 – Monday through Friday from 12 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Publisher of Bookstore Sá da Costa – Praça Luís de Camões, 22 – 4th floor, Lisboa