ANDRÉ CEPEDA

FILIPA CÉSAR

JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO

JOÃO ONOFRE

JOÃO PEDRO VALE + NUNO ALEXANDRE FERREIRA

JONATHAN MONK

JOSÉ LOUREIRO

MARIANA GOMES

ROBERT BARRY

YONAMINE

“We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.”

- Don Delillo, in White Noise (1985)

The title of this exhibition didn’t come to us from Don DeLillo but rather from a constant provocation to find a name for the group exhibition that includes the artists we can see here today.

“White noise” is a random signal with the same intensity at different frequencies. In this show, the signal comprises the various works on display. Different white noises that over the years have contributed to the creation of artistic discourse and, as DeLillo says, are part of a “collective perception” we’ve agreed to be a part of.

Perhaps because of the gallery owner’s influence, perhaps by chance, the works grouped in this exhibition refer to the evocation of symbols that more or less directly remove the need for a certain suspension of disbelief.

What I mean by this is that when we enter the exhibition and encounter a question mark painted on a white canvas, accompanied by a text explaining the origin of this question mark (What is seen is described, what is described is seen, version XIII), we can only hope to discard any need to create a fiction or a story to explain or unite all these works.

Jonathan Monk’s question opening the exhibition with its strong typographic character later becomes a statement in the form of a sign found on a Bordeaux street by André Cepeda — TRUTH. And perhaps the artist’s street photography has never had such a strong need to show the truth. But which truth is it? The artist’s? Ours? That of a passer-by on a city street? We don’t find cinema, despite the contrasting black and white of the photographs. What André Cepeda offers us are places, people who somehow belong there and have been frozen there in that space, of the four corners of the photograph, which relieves the viewer of any possibility of a continuation of reality.

And no matter how much fiction we want to create or how much cinema there might be, with Filipa César’s installation F for Fake (first presented in 2005) it is now forbidden to us.

F for Fake alters the viewer’s perception of Orson Welles’ 1973 film of the same name. The story of an art thief is interrupted by the director, Welles, who breaks the fourth wall several times, turning to the viewer and deceiving them at various moments. César’s F For Fake uses this collective cinematic imaginary to deepen the conceptual idea of cinema through forced participation. César turns the cinematic into the social. At the same time we are confronted with a monstrous F, created from tapes recorded with the artist’s and Welles’ falsehood.

In White Noise, the real is often false. The four photographs we find by João Maria Gusmão, or rather “photographs of photographs” — prints of a series made between 2022 and 2024 — are the concealment of the real. Small images of a collection of Japanese ceremonial bowls (chawan), but made by an English ceramist; photographed analytically, but taken to the laboratory to be subjected to alchemical, fantastic and almost divinatory tests; which are at the same time what you see, a tautological process of meaning that doesn’t want or allow a photograph of a bowl to stop being just that, a photograph, or a bowl.

Yonamine is direct and no less astonishing for it. Everything in his painting is symbolic - in this case, the capitalist colonialism that the artist was able to observe while living in Zimbabwe.

A blue background, which refers to the Union Jack, the original coloniser; reflective bands from workers’ waistcoats, representing the different stripes of this new British flag; Chinese trade and its control over Zimbabwe’s means of production, through a stencil of the Chinese central bank; and, to reclaim this new colonialism, the soldiers of the Queen’s Guard, sewn onto the canvas and showing some differences from the originals that we can observe when travelling in England. All this is contained in the title of this series of canvases, Azul Indígena [Indigenous Blue].

Even João Pedro Vale + Nuno Alexandre Ferreira’s sculpture cannot escape the denial of fiction. Here we see a trunk (of a tree?) made of hundreds of jeans and a historical document published by the Lisbon City Council, which not only refuses to mention the words for what they are, but also fines anyone who dares to place A Mão na Coisa, A Coisa na Boca, A Boca na Coisa, A Coisa na Mão (2018) [The Hand in the Thing, the Thing in the Mouth, the Mouth in the Thing, the Thing in the Hand.]. It’s a work that through its verticality, subverts what could be a pillory, a place of castration and humiliation into a column, a monument that commemorates and honours all the people who fought or rebelled against the repression and persecution of homosexuals in Portugal during the Estado Novo.

Straightforwardly, Mariana Gomes and José Loureiro deconstruct painting to the point where one tries to reach its most refined level, treading lightly between catastrophe and gift. And the other, younger, in search of form, not the perfect form, but the process of metamorphosis in constant flux. Loureiro argued in 2013 that “colour and brushstroke are a single, indestructible entity. That’s why there is time and duration, beginning and end.” For Mariana Gomes, metamorphosis is not imaginary or fictional; it’s always formal and theoretical as if it were possible to paint movement without relating it to the moving object.

In João Onofre’s TACET we find a Prepared Piano that is set on fire by a pianist playing John Cage’s 4’33‘’. If Cage has a relationship with this film through his silent piece, he also has it with his “chance operations”, indeterminate events that demonstrate randomness within the context of artistic creation. Given the dilemma faced by the performer of whether or not to continue playing the piece, the imminent tension of the approaching fire, the driving force behind Onofre’s work is its “programmatic indeterminacy”.

The exhibition ends with two works by Robert Barry, a contemporary of Cage and producer of many other random operations. His canvases are assembled by throwing six coins on the floor and transposing their location to that of the paintings on the wall. Barry uses language as a weapon to throw at modern art questioning modern utopias and is, in a way, one of the driving forces behind this new collective and conceptual perception of contemporary art.

João Francisco Reis

July 2024