The work of João Tabarra (b. 1966, Lisbon, Portugal) has been characterized by the attempt of returning an ethic dimension to artistic production. Having begun his professional activity as a photojournalist and image editor for a big-selling journal, he soon abandoned this practice for the uncertainties of artistic production, in a choice that was strengthened by the suspicion towards the reality and the supposedly neutral and objective character of documental photography. Sharing this distrust towards reality with the distrust towards creative 'will', his work has bent to a critical practice of artistic activity, especially on the broader context of Portuguese society that was integrated on a social and economical plan that was beginning to be designed abroad.
The profound knowledge of the journalistic system has informed him of every image's possibility of being manipulated and of the necessity of a critical and responsible practice in their production. By using an image, either moving or static, as a means for producing significations through stagings that are characterized by an economy of resources in their production, the artist is represented in his work as a 'militant for moral fables', which brings him closer to Jeff Wall's ventriloquism than to a narcissistic or introspective exercise. his images are not self-portraits but rather self-representations, articulated by a scrupulous work of composition together with the attention to detail where every element is taken into account for the global significance of the image, this way coming closer to a critical perspective of 'cinematographic vision' that has been characterizing a lot of the contemporary photographic production.
Being a believer in the determinant role of art in transforming the perception of the social field and being opposed to the personal subjectivity present in much of the 90s production, João Tabarra's work indicates the need of always keep a spirit of critical distrust towards the images that are produced. With strong outlines imported from the neo-conceptualist criticism and from activist art -without ever being mistaken by an 'engagé' posture in an affirmative way - the author pragmatically questions the dominating logics of the information and consumer's society of today. A critical conscience and rigor in the approach, irony, and appearance mark his work filmed according to a critical creative strategy and expanded in the photographic field.
For someone who has been choosing the photographic medium as privileged support for his work, the current exhibition, opening the 6th November at Cristina Guerra - Contemporary Art gallery confirms the importance that image, in its broader sense, (and also the mediating vision) occupies in its creative process and permanently reminds us how we cannot rely on our vision as a means of mediation with the world and how much technology threatens our belief in reality.
In 'Second Chance' (2003) two identical and simultaneous video screenings, recorded with the resource to two different technological devices (a professional video camera and a state of the art mobile phone equipped with a camera) he presents in a single shot the image of a boat in the horizon, whose content is both stressed out and paradoxically hidden. The difference in the registry (in a time when mobility and the video phone connectivity is brought forth an informative device) together with the weight of image permanently reminds us of the possibilities of the common citizen's empowerment by the means of technological democratization and of the perverse and persecutory effects of that power.
This feeling is magnified in another video where the violent performance that is presented is disrupted by the presence of the 'chroma green trace - the older and most basic special effect in audiovisuals - substituting the blood-red, which alerts us to the dangerous neutralization and unlikeness of the images broadcasted by our mediatic horizon.
Finally, in the last work to be presented, Tabarra is recorded on video handling an embalmed animal, that, very slowly, quotes and ironically re-enacts one of the most famous scenes of the 90s cinematography.
Thus, the central work of the exhibition, 'Officer and Gentleman' (2003), a vertically projected video, portraits the author as a performer (and agent) of a minimal disturbance capable of a maximum changing in the reading of the projected image.
The second work, 'The Carrot Quest' (2003) - a fake loop created by the synchronized projection of five slide projectors - recalls an already posed question: the reification and artificiality in the materialisation of nature, a parable for a life filled with uncertainties and fears.