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Entrevista de Álvaro Queiroz a João Galrão  




Filme realizado por Álvaro Queiroz no atelier em Sintra de João Galrão em 30.11.2011 faz parte do acervo da Cinemateca Portuguesa - ANIM- Arquivo Nacional de Imagens em Movimento para memoria futura.

Work in Progress

" Large jet" - Série " Moments of pleasure"

  " Large jet" - Série " Moments of pleasure" 2011
 Madeira - Wood

 96 x 24 x 21 cm

 

 

Afrontamentos 6  

Casa das Artes, Palácio da Brejoeira, Monção

Colectiva

 http://projecto-afrontamentos.blogspot.com/

 

Beatriz Albuquerque, Carla Cabanas, Edu Pimenta, Joao Cortez, Joao Galrao, João Pedro Rodrigues, João Vilhena, Manuela Pimentel, Nuno Delmas, Pauliana Valente Pimentel , Sónia Carvalho.

Performance CRISE no AMOR de Beatriz Albuquerque, 17h-18h.

Inauguração 17 Julho domingo às 17h.

Até 4 de Setembro de 2011

Palacio da Brejoeira - Viticultores, SA

Pinheiros 4950-660 Monção - Portugal

casadasartes@palaciodabrejoeira.pt

Live Stream - www.arteinstitute.org or www.facebook.com/ArteInstitute

Afrontamentos (Affronts) is a collective project, where several artists will present works created around the matrix "Affronts". This ambiguous concept will take particular visual and conceptual forms, by confronting the public with the several solutions presented. An active, non passive reaction is expected, spanning from amazement, to eroticism, and social reflection.

Afrontamentos problematizes concepts such as intimacy or space. Space, as gallery or cultural space, which can be transformed by different artistic solutions, so as the public, which can be transformed, affronted.

This project aims at an inter action with several cultural spaces, galleries and museums. Two examples of this interaction are, for instance, "Afrontamentos 1", by André Fadrique and Vanessa Muscolino, at Projecto de Vila Nova de Cerveira Gallery, and "Afrontamentos 2", a collective work, at Casa da Guia, Cascais.

This project does not intend to be limited to a physical space, nor to include the same artists all the time. It aims at versatility and continuity, therefore cross-cutting experiences from Northern to Southern Portugal, among the artists and their audience.

(By Maria de Fátima Lambert)

Projecto " My Self Twice" 2008

João Galrão from Arte Institute on Vimeo.

1 colagem tamanho A4
1 Video – performance one-line (“Keyra Tribute” 2008) no Facebook e Blogspot apenas visível a amigos e convidados dos Afrontamentos.

“ My self Twice” é um projecto que resulta da minha análise e investigação apresentado ao longo do Projecto Afrontamentos. É composta por uma colagem e uma vídeo – performance , “ Keyra tribute” – Strip Cover project, 2008. que vai estar one line na página dos Afrontamentos e no Blogspot, em que alguns amigos e convidados podem ver.


Este processo técnico da colagem é focado na distorção visual da imagem através da visualização de dois planos em simultâneo, esta técnica é utilizada na colagem com a perfuração de uma das imagens com um x–acto, isto na peça de parede e de chão (revistas).


O universo sexual e a carga erótica, são uns dos elementos chave na contextualização e no fundamento deste projecto, e o símbolo sexual masculino ( falo – pénis ) o ponto de focagem, abordando a problemática e os tábus que a sociedade com este associa.


O “eu” enquanto artista está presente, tamanho A4 (poster), existindo um elemento surpresa quando as colagens da minha personagem são reveladas . A perfomance associada a este gesto está presente nas colagens e no vídeo, existindo aqui uma ocupação da personagem e performer, participante na acção.


No vídeo “Keyra tribute” é visualizada duas acções em simultâneo, a original e a cover, resultante da filmagem de dois links abertos e sincronizados. É indiferente a fidelidade aos gestos originais da striper, estando por vezes desconectados. O video original resulta de um strip do canal supertangas.com. Está publicado recentemente em privado no facebook.
Esta ambiguidade na interpretação dos papéis sociais é aqui saliente, nas colagens como estrela porno star masculina e no vídeo como stripper feminina.

PICTIK

Residência artística na Galeria Jorge Shirley

" Viola-me" 2011

Lixo inorganico, madeira, gaze, massa mineral e esmalte acrílico
150 x 36 x 39 cm

O projecto PICTNIK é o primeiro na lista de iniciativas que procuram dinamizar a galeria Jorge Shirley. Aqui, dez artistas juntam-se do dia 02 de Junho a 07 de Julho de 2011 no espaço da galeria. Ocupando os dois pisos ao montar os seus ateliers de cariz nomádico, com o propósito de projectar e materializar uma obra artística neste período de tempo.

Os dez elementos do projecto PICTNIK são:

ALEXANDRE RENDEIRO | ANDRÉ FRADIQUE | CARLOS GASPAR | EDU PIMENTA | FILIPA CORDEIRO | HELENA VIEIRA | INÊS VALLE | IVO MOREIRA | JOÃO GALRÃO | TIAGO BAPTISTA

Não existem traços mediáticos nem conceptuais no trabalho pessoal dos artistas que legitimem por si só o seu ajuntamento neste projecto. No entanto, a proximidade pessoal entre estes e a vontade de testar a sua cumplicidade quanto à metodologia de trabalho de cada um, faz com que este atelier comunitário seja um espaço propício à análise da contaminação entre diferentes artistas bem como, a forma como os seus egos rejeitam ou abraçam a influência dos outros.

O projecto possui um outro contagioso input, os eventos-satélite, que ao longo deste período, vários intervirão no espaço, através de uma multitude mediática que passa pela música, poesia e pela mostra cinemática.

Ver mais em:

http://pictnik.blogspot.com/

Meus Vícios dentro
                                                  
Dia 6 de Abril das 19.30 ás 23h Drop-D
Rua da Trindade, nº 7 (perto do Largo do Carmo 

“ Meus vícios dentro” resulta da abordagem que o artista desenvolveu sobre a apropriação dos costumes e hábitos de fumador para o seu campo de trabalho, utilizando as embalagens de tabaco de enrolar nas suas peças, quer de escultura quer de pintura.

Na escultura este material e outros, como papeis e cartão é enrolado, criando volumes diferenciados. Na pintura é usado como base do trabalho, de influencia pop e cores vibrantes.

                                                             
Hard Feelings

Colectiva

André Fradique
João Galrão
Susana Guardado
Vanessa Muscolino
Aldo Peixinho
Edu Pimenta
Ricardo Santanna

Inauguração: 8 de Abril pelas 19h

Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações – Museu das Comunicações
( Junto à Etic e Inovartes )
8 de Abril a 6 de Maio 2010

 

Exposição Hard Feelings (Making Of) from Alexandra Serôdio on Vimeo.

Projecto colectivo em que 7 artistas plásticos abordam a temática do “coração simbólico” e a sua complexidade teórica e conceptual. Apesar de ser uma matéria comum e permanente na cultura ocidental tem vindo a generalizar-se e ser mesmo abusado na sua publicação. Facilmente caiu no mediatismo da nossa sociedade sendo um tema até considerado “piegas”. Estes factores levam este projecto a ser um desafio maior e as soluções apresentadas um reflexo de cada artista , da sua vivência e empatia com o denominador comum, o coração.

Desdobrável - Catálogo: Textos de Ana Matos e Bárbara Valentina

Location: Lisboa, Museu das Comunicações

  

 " Someone to love me" 2010
 Madeira

Obras - Works

Sem Titulo 2011
Madeira, Gaze, massa mineral, esmalte acrílico




































S/titulo 2005 ( série After Hours)
Plástico,lixo inorganico,
massa mineral, esmalte acrílico
Colecção particular


























s/titulo 2005, série "after hours"
Esferovite, gaze, plástico
( colecção particular)































s/titulo 2005
esférovite armado(gaze, massa mineral
e primário) e esmalte acrílico.

" Slow Motion Project" 2007
Colagens A4 - Papel de Revista

Exposições anteriores

1ª individual . Galeria Graça Brandão 2003

The Shapes’ Skin

Before I was confronted with the floor structures (let’s call them that) this text was going to be titled “the canvas’ skin”. In fact, the wall structures presented in this exhibition by João Galrão evoke a revolution in the painting’s surface remotely connected to Frank Stella’s shaped canvas or to Lucio Fontana’s cracked (and tom) canvas. In the first instance, the revolution was on the surface: the canvas did not resign itself to its rectangular condition, as if painting itself wanted to experiment other shapes and so multiplied (although in a rigorous and planned way) in the most convenient formal solutions, expanding but keeping its bi-dimensionality. In the second case, we can talk of a canvas own pathology: it cracks itself into a resolute cut of well-defined edges or it presents multiple perforations, as if showing its incapacity to contain the painting. It thus turns its disease into vitality, its fragility into force, as if the corporal offences it suffered, the incisive or obtuse wound, were now aesthetical and conceptual arguments. But in both cases the problem was decided on the surface, through a strategy of controlled expansion or through a strategy of incision, of perforation. The painter went beyond the square painting, amplifying it in more opportune configurations, or went beyond, to the other side of the canvas, going through its skin, tearing it.

In João Galrão’s case the problem is no longer one of the canvas passive response, reacting to an impulsive from the author, but a kind of mutiny of the canvas itself or, even better, of mutiny of an entity that hides behind the canvas. There is in these works a kind of third element, with an hidden body, which lives behind the painting and that, having stayed for a long time in an illusory sleep, all of a sudden woke up, started to stir an to push the canvas to the outside or sucking it inside. The canvas puts on volume, it no longer grows to the sides, it no longer tears but moves, denouncing that occult entity that is no longer capable of living in anonymity and is ready to emerge. The canvas become sculpture, even better, a wish of sculpture. The author’s monochromatic strategy is not indifferent to this wish. These monochromatic works, sometimes of very strong colours, reinforce the shape’s intension. Of burgeoning shape, the shape that pushes the surface to the outside of itself, transforming a horizontal plane into an undulated vertigo with multiple contours that reinforce its structural complexity.

This idea of art as the apprehension of a time to come, as the anticipation of a transformation, is particularly meaningful in the designation João Galrão found to name the floor structures. He called them “omens”, i.e. anticipations of the future, anticipations of transformation. The idea of transformation also recalls the situation of the unsatisfied form, the trans-form. The author is, thus the discloser of the mutiny of shapes. Or of the mutiny of surfaces that want to be shapes and of the shapes that at once hide and show that desire. His paintings want to be sculptures and his sculptures want to be figures (although, for now, they are only ghosts), in a continuous process of transformation of the surface in volume and of volume in movement. It is not thus anomalous that, looking at those acrylic volumes, we have the sensation we are in the presence of tied entities, muzzled that can all of a sudden crack that vitreous varnish that coats and shuts them.

It is by developing the concept of transitory form, of form with flexible skin, that the pertinence of this exhibition is patent. These works are, above all, manifestation of anxiety; they are, above all, the detection of a shape’s respiration that art always tried to discipline. That is why there is here, beyond the formal (even structural) surprise, a disquietness, a plastic dissatisfaction connected to the fact of these works being “omens”, as if the reality’s skin, the skin of the present, was close to bursting.

Paulo Cunha e Silva

Porto 2003

Scenes on the Life of Walls
It was a narrow corridor between white walls. At least, I recall the scene in black and white. From a certain moment on, the space between the walls starts to appear as disturbed, disturbing. The walls’ surface starts to gain life, as if behind the walls there were bodies with hands, breaths, respirations, threatening fingers. Chasings and harassments. Oscillations and involvements.

“Repulsion” is the title of the movie Roman Polanski directed in 1965 in the United Kingdom, where I might have seen a scene close to the one describe above. But ”repulsion” is not the right word, unless it is linked, indissociably, to a symmetric word such as, for instance, “attraction”. Repulsion and attraction, a mix with a considerable potential of voluptuousness. Maybe we could say the same thing in a simpler way just by talking of fear and temptation. Whichever words we choose, we know we are talking about potential physical effects of a seduction’s dynamics. Freddy Kruger, a famous character from horror movies, also dedicates himself frequently to make grow in walls, screens, steps, ceilings and sheets the most disturbing and frightening protuberances, threats and challenges. His objective, like a sculptor of souls, is to torment and seduce in dreams the objects of his favour. It is not by chance that one of Freddy’s most notorious quotes is his tempting appeal. “Come to Daddy!” On another occasion we will talk about the meanings of the word “daddy” in different contexts (see the sculpture “Big daddy”, 1999).

It may seem exaggerated that talking about works so clear, limpid and geometrical as seem to be (and are) João Galrão’s we start by talking about seduction processes.

João Galrão’s formation is in sculpture. Seduction cam in this case be the name of the relation between the body and the forms: the artist’s body, the observer’s body, the shape of the materials used as a base of the artist’s work (wood, canvas, stone, wool) and the shape of the final sheltering space of the works and how the observer circulates (a room, the walls in a room or in a corridor).

It is then a matter of embodying shapes and of shaping the body.

The mould, the negative of the mould, the tracing and the digital print are some of the most direct ways of this kind of procedures. João Galrão used them in an imaginative and experimental manner in many of his first works, where direct marks of body’s fragments were recognisable (see “Play Objects”, 1998) or there was an appeal to direct contact with the observer’s body (see “Nice Punish”, 1999).

Amongst the works now gathered for his first individual exhibition, João Galrão presents an ensemble of monochromatic canvasses stretched over wood gratings built with relieves as sculptural pieces.

At first glance they are abstract works, as even the basic shape is the square and the surfaces have a uniform colour. We should then evoke the geometrical abstraction, the tradition of the “monochrome” and the minimalism, and all theses reminiscences are pertinent.

But we can also recall that abstract art is the most concrete of all arts, because by aspiring to be the pure physical presence of form (disconnected from any intention of representation, with what representation implies of abstraction relatively to a reality to be represented) it ends up being the one most close to the statute of the body, perceived as a pure physical presence of a form. Especially if we consider the body as the place of a surface’s vertigo in whose epidermis all rigours and abysses of metaphysics and geometry fit.

We therefore come to a sensible paradox: João Galrão abstract paintings are concrete bodies.

In order to apprehend the pertinence of the conjunction between abstract and concrete or between geometry and sensibility we just have to recall, for instance, the way the Brazilian artistic vanguard of the 20th century second-half (Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape) evolved from neo-concretism, which could be seen as a variant of geometrical abstraction, to the elaboration of a vast and extremely rich repertoire of experiences in evocation and direct involvement of bodies. One only has to think, just to give a few examples, in Oiticica’s “penetrables”, in Lygia Clark’s “gloves” or in Lygia Pape’s “webs”.

João Galrão’s works embody shapes.

The canvas becomes another canvas, and the wall that receives the canvas, skin over skin, becomes a different wall, because over them passed a body that left its mark or, if one likes, the mark of its mark. The rhetorical mechanism of parting is here used to earmark the self-sufficiency of the work process specifically plastic/artistic that transforms what might have been the mere mark of a body into a self-sufficient aesthetical object, but one where, delicately, the symptoms of the passage of a body are still manifest. In he same way that in a body the symptoms of fever are still manifest, after it has gone, under the guise of a sensorial pacification, a cold sweat where the body rests, its trances forgotten, abandoned to the virtues of aesthetic or to sleep.

The room because a different one because the steps and the look of the visitor are now guided by the rhythm of the colours and undulation these works stamp in the space that receives them. It is a palpable tranquillity, a cosy but vibrating rhythm, where small explosions of surprising colours ensure a palpitating cadence. The sculptures, in the middle of the gallery, offer themselves as the visitor’s doubles, functioning as a physical counterpoint of his presence and orientating his movements.

João Galrão’s works give shapes to the body because, by escaping figuration, which is always a codification, open room for a clarity and distension exercise. The shapes develop before our eyes as the pacified territory of a preserved memory under a mute and obliging light. Memory of a sensuality of closed eyes where images were substituted by textures.

A geometry of caresses.

Alexandre Melo

Port, 2003

"Perdidos e achados"

Galeria Castelo 66, 2003, Lagos

"Contratempo"

Agência Vera Cortês,Galeria Politécnica, Lisboa,2005


































"A produção artística de J.G.(n.1975) tem-se desenvolvido no terreno do objecto e da sua possível plasticidade. Em ocasiões anteriores, mostrou estruturas em relevo, de paredes e de chão, feitas em material acrílico cuja morfologia subtilmente agressiva acrescentava qualquer coisa à sua condição tendicialmente minimal. Em "contratempo", apresenta um conjunto de objectos/esculturas de chão e de parede predominantemente em esferovite armada, ou em fibra de vidro (por vezes agregadas a peças de mobiliário ou furadas com tubos de pvc), cujo aspecto é mais orgânico. Embora as suas formas lembrarem vagamente estalactites, formas corporais ou o relevo ou paisagem, não remetem para nenhum conteúdo concreto. São por isso efabulações formais, por vezes algo decorativas,mas, nos melhores casos, possuidoras de uma sensualidade etéria."







Texto de Celso Martins, Revista Actual, do jornal Expresso, 12 de Fevereiro de 2005

"Antes de Partir"

Galeria Casa triangulo, S.Paulo, Brasil, 2005
http://www.casatriangulo.com (ver em exposições)

"Densidades Relativas"

Colectiva, Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão - Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2005 (comissária: Leonor Nazaré)

 























João Galrão was born in Sintra in 1975. He completed his course in Conservation and Restoration of Heritage Sites at EPRP in Sintra in 1996 and an Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Ar.Co, Lisbon. He has exhibited his work in group exhibitions since 1996. Among other group shows, João Galraão participated in RAMb (Lisbon, 1997) with several emerging artists and Greenspaces (2000, Estufa Fria, Lisbon) with Armanda Duarte. Here more exhibitions were held in 2003.
In 2003, João Galrão placed some objects on the floor amongst the works he exhibited at Graça Brandão Gallery (Porto): a white surface enveloped a skeleton built in layers, its protuberances, points and curved perimeters stretching the canvas out in various directions. Like small ghosts or figures searching for a body, these points of import seemed to developed in space, hinting at strong eruptions beneath their covering. One colud almost feel the pulsation of these apparently immaculate, yet potentially unpredictable beings.
A sculptural component also coexists with a pictorial component in his wall pieces (acrylic on canvas)- inhabited by the secret relation between what lies beneath and by the artist’s imagination, and what one sees as a bystander.
In the work from the CAMJAP collection, the canvas is as white as the sculptures on the floor (significantly entitled Presságios (Omens)). The centre of this canvas is smooth, but the edges, and unevenness of the wood stretcher, extend the cloth like a beaten sheet.
In the previously mentioned exhibition, Galrão displayed several of these objects on the walls. Though monochromatic, Galrão used a wide range of colours: greys, yellow, red, and pink. He also used the effect of sectioned waves and spokes in other cases, placing them either below the surface of the canvas, or concentrating a number of them in one of its corners-giving the impression of a living being in search of an escape.
With some diptychs, Galrão creates an expressive commissure where two blocks meet-a depression mended with several stitches.
In 1998 and 1999, he worked with a number of materials including stone and wool. Together with his use of wood and canvas clearly sculptural forms are produced. Galrão builds objects that evoke or summon a direct physical relation, as is the case of Play Objects (1998) or the sculpture entitled Big Daddy (1999).
The value of texture and the skin of things is maintained in his most recent work, like an active agent, soliciting feelings of tactile curiosity and hesitation, of attraction and fear in the beholder-the same perplexity that a glimpse of what is invisible (the inside) from a visible viewpoint (the outside) normally provokes.

Texto de Leonor Nazaré

Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão

( ver texto em Português em http://www.camjap.gulbenkian.org )