Wolfgang Tillmans, Photographs In Between

Exhibition view

Wolfgang Tillmans (at the Serralves Museum until April 25, 2016) is a man of limits, borders, open spaces and ambiguities: a man who balances his art, sometimes precariously, in between. Here, many photographs are ambiguous, in between day and night, in between sky and sea –or maybe it is the ground? Almost everything here is atmospheric, intangible, indefinable, oscillating between liquid and gas forms. There are few straight lines –save for the horizon–, everything is sinuous, fluid. Is this a cloud? a wave? a contrail from an aircraft? Or are those only illusions, fabricated in the darkroom (since the artist swears blind he does not use Photoshop)?

A Meditative Visit

Liam Gillick, Factories in the Snow, Serralves Museum

A large room, flooded by light on the day of my visit. A black Yamaha baby grand piano in the middle, isolated: no bench, no pianist. On the floor, some black dust: was the piano planed down, was its varnish grated, is the dust made of shavings? A melody plays by itself: a vaguely familiar air, obviously played as if by a beginner. Then, after a slow walk down the long access ramp, a closer look: the piano keys are automatically pressed and released, one by one, and, in fact, there is an electronic control unit that commands it all. The –presumed– artificial black snow on the floor does not melt, the –supposed– pianist is not here. As for the audible melody, it is a clumsy interpretation of an emblematic tune of the last European revolution, which took place here, in Portugal: the end of an era, the end of a great hope (even if the air is still sung in Portugal: the government is sometimes “Grandoled”). And, to boot, a lozenge of light on the wood floor, and a pretty, smiling museum guard.

Helena Almeida, Artist Incarnate

Helena Almeida, A casa [The House], 1979, 40x29cm. Coll. Mario Sequeira

Helena Almeida’s exhibition, shown in Porto at the Serralves Foundation (October 17, 2015 – January 10, 2016) under the name “My work is my body, my body is my work”, is travelling to Paris: it will be presented at the Jeu de Paume, titled “Corpus” (February 9 – May 22, 2016). Finally, the body is addressed by the contemporary Portuguese art scene, which almost never does so, focusing instead on the concept, on humor, on history, and thus neglecting embodiment, and the (very few) artists who have made the body the focal point of their work (Helena Almeida, Jorge Molder also, and the occasional young artist, including Brazilians living in Portugal, like Lizi Menezes…). And this goes beyond contemporary art: I visited the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga with a friend a few days ago, which obviously features bodies in its collections of classical paintings and sculptures –but are those bodies naked? No way! In searching dutifully every nook and cranny of the Museum, I found one and only one female breast outrageously naked (save for a few Virgins breastfeeding, a few damned souls in hell, and a tiny allegory on ivory), by a Dutch painter. No Venuses, no Graces. Granted, this beautiful museum features, on the other hand, some Bosch, and more daring temporary exhibitions, but what a strange national puritanism in visual arts, not only concerning nudes but more simply the reluctance to give prominence to bodies (but this is not true for dance or film –if anyone can clue me in…).

Performance Art of All Kinds

The Serralves Foundation in Porto has organised two days of performance art, a rather modest event in comparison to the Nouveau Festival at Centre Pompidou or Performa, but the compact timeframe of these two days displayed a wide variety of approaches, and therefore offered an opportunity to examine the very definition of performance art. In such a vein, does the simple reading of a text (a text which was not fully comprehensible to me), read without the least theatrical intonation and with a heavy monotone voice during roughly an hour, really constitute performance art (Isabel Carvalho, Tartaruga)?

Loreto Martinez Troncoso, Waiting