ana vidigal: 2022

5.11.22

Folha de Sala - não me peça que lhe dê pormenores” - Gabinete de Leitura - Casa da Cerca

Desde os anos 80, ainda a frequentar a Escola de Belas Artes de Lisboa, que Ana Vidigal faz livros de artista. O último que apresenta na exposição é datado já deste ano, 2022. Não são livros de projetos, ou de esboços, nem são livros de ideias. São obras. Cada uma deles dá continuidade ao trabalho que a pintora realiza nas suas telas, desenhos ou instalações, seja pela sua estética, temática ou apenas pela técnica. Por vezes, nascem de um projeto específico para o formato livro, outras advêm da vontade de guardar material, ou restos utilizados noutras obras e que nos aqui ganham uma nova dimensão. Se na pintura trabalha por séries, Vidigal aborda cada livro como um projeto isolado (com algumas excepções), mas no qual trabalha ao longo do tempo.

Ana Vidigal afirma que nunca começa uma tela em branco, o mesmo acontece com os seus livros. A colagem é aqui, como em grande parte da sua obra,uma das suas técnicas de eleição. O seu processo artístico – igual há mais de 40 anos - passa por uma recolha obsessiva de material que guarda em caixas: espólios de família, heranças de amigos, encontros em feiras de segunda mão - postais, fotografias, revistas, moldes de costura, novelas. Antes de começar umapeça ou série, volta aos seus caixotes, ao seu arquivo. Aescolha de que material utilizar é sempre intuitiva,emotiva e também situada num determinado contexto da sua vida e do mundo.

Marcada pelo humor e ironia, a obra de Ana Vidigal é também altamente politizada e crítica. A aparente simplicidade e proximidade dos materiais que escolhe – fotografias domésticas, bandas desenhada, lavores, -marcados por uma imagética infantil, algo pueril e popular, permitem que a artista aborde de forma subtiltemas fraturantes da sociedade portuguesa como o papel que é atribuído à mulher, o racismo, a questão colonial. Muito do material que usa/acumula carrega mensagens subjacentes com um cariz patriarcal, machista, racista e fascista, o qual Vidigal tenta denunciar e expor. Vejamos o exemplo de um dos livros de artista que apresenta na exposição. A Guerra Colonial tem sido também um tema importante no seu trabalho. Define-se como filha da guerra, e as suas consequências continuam a deixar marcas profundasem si e na sociedade. Numa das suas caixas de arquivo encontrou um conjunto grande de postais fotográficos trazidos pelo seu bisavô, . para tentar mostrar à família o que viveu e o que encontrou, enquanto esteve estacionado em África durante as guerras da libertação. Vidigal legendou cada imagem com provérbios, provenientes de uma pesquisa à palavra ‘negro’ que aartista realizou no livro de ditados portugueses. Deparou-se com ditados de uma enorme violência racial, que ainda hoje continuamos a proferir sem nos apercebermos muitas vezes do profundo racismo que carregam. Se, por um lado, a conjugação dos provérbios com as imagens descontextualiza e reconfigura-as, por outro lado, Vidigal aponta o dedo as estruturas racistas que continuam a marcar o nosso quotidiano e identidade, baralhando, densificando e problematizando as imagens que consumimos acriticamente.

Ana Vidigal has been making artist's books since the 1980s, when she was still attending the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. The last one she presents at the exhibition is from this year, 2022. They are not books of projects, or sketches, nor are they books of ideas. They are works. Each one of them gives continuity to the work the painter does on her canvases, drawings or installations, whether for its aesthetics, theme or just technique. Sometimes they are born from a specific project for the book format, others come from the will to save material, or leftovers used in other works and that here gain a new dimension. If in painting she works in series, Vidigal approaches each book as an isolated project (with some exceptions), but on which she works over time.

Ana Vidigal states that she never starts on blank canvas, the same happens with her books. Collage is here, as in much of her work, one of her techniques of choice. Her artistic process - the same for over 40 years - involves an obsessive collection of material that she keeps in boxes: family heirlooms, friends' inheritances, encounters at second-hand fairs - postcards, photographs, magazines, sewing patterns, novels. Before starting a piece or series, she goes back to her boxes, to her archive. The choice of which material to use is always intuitive, emotional and also situated in a certain context of her life and the world.

Marked by humour and irony, Ana Vidigal's work is also highly politicised and critical. The apparent simplicity and proximity of the materials she chooses - domestic photographs, comic strips, lavender, - marked by a childish, somewhat puerile and popular imagery, allow the artist to subtly address fracturing themes of Portuguese society, such as the role attributed to women, racism and the colonial question. Much of the material she uses/accumulates carries underlying messages of a patriarchal, macho, racist and fascist nature, which Vidigal tries to denounce and expose. Let us look at the example of one of the artist's books presented in the exhibition. The Colonial War has also been an important theme in her work. She defines herself as a child of war, and its consequences continue to leave deep marks in her and in society. In one of her archive boxes she found a large set of photographic postcards brought by her great-grandfather, . to try to show her family what she experienced and what she encountered while she was stationed in Africa during the liberation wars. Vidigal captioned each image with proverbs, coming from a research on the word 'negro' that the artist carried out in the book of Portuguese sayings. She came across sayings of enormous racial violence, which we still say today without often realising the deep racism they carry. If, on the one hand, the conjugation of the proverbs with the images decontextualises and reconfigures them, on the other hand Vidigal points the finger at the racist structures that continue to mark our daily life and identity, shuffling, densifying and problematising the images we uncritically consume.

13.6.22

ESCOLA DE LIBERTINAGEM | GROUP SHOW | CURADORIIA DE ALEXANDRE MELO | FRANCISCO FINO | 08.06 a 30.07.2022

Dans mon empire!

Ici, docteur, tout m’est soumis.

Voici la nuit de Walpurgis!

[In my empire!

Here, doctor, I control everything.

This is the night of Walpurgis!]

(Faust, Charles Gounod, 1859, libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré loosely based on Goethe’s eponymous work)

School of Libertinage sprung from conversations – a curator is a conversationalist – with Julião Sarmento on the beaches and terraces of the Algarve in the summer of 2020. Julião described the piece that he was going to present and the conversation ensued. In fact, it had already started a while before when the artist produced a set of works for volume VI (Justine und Juliette) of a German edition (Matthes & Seitz, Munich, 1995) of Sade’s work.

Conversations that are without a beginning or an end can teach us what cannot be learned in school, where the insistence is upon teaching ‘that which we do not know’. As Marguerite Duras explained so well in the film Les Enfants (1985) through the words of a mother who justifies her child’s reluctance to attend class: ‘he doesn’t want to learn things that he doesn’t know’.

We shall open a ‘School of Libertinage’ (subtitle of the 1975 Arcádia edition of Os 120 Dias de Sodoma [The 120 Days of Sodoma]) in which to learn what the body knows already and learn what we tentatively call the soul. A new kind of school, a chance to get to know that which we already know without knowing it. Conversation, school, libertinage and so forth.

SADE (1740 – 1814)

Sade – who was in prison at the time – answers a letter from his wife who asked for his dirty laundry:

‘Charming creature, you want my linen, my old linen? Do you know that is complete tact? You see how I sense the value of things. Listen, my angel, I have every wish in the world to satisfy you in this matter, because you know the respect I have for tastes, for fantasies: however baroque they may be, I find them all respectable, for one is not the master of them, and because the most singular or bizarre of them, when well examined, always depends on a principle of tact’.

The notion of tact allows Roland Barthes to undertake a reading of ‘Sadian’ writing that is an alternative to the common-place usually evoked by the word ‘sadism’, which exhausts itself in the dialectics of violence and counter-violence. ‘Sadian tact [délicatesse] is not a product of class, an attribute of civilization, a style of culture. It is a power of analysis and a means of ejaculation [jouissance]: analysis and ejaculation join together to produce and exaltation that is unknown in our societies and which constitutes therefore the most formidable of utopias’. (Sade, Fourier, Loyola)

Sadian tact could therefore be understood as an exceptional form of attention. In 1971, the candour of Barthes’ words did not come across as too embarrassing.

SÉGUR (1753 – 1830)

‘We laugh at old mores, at feudal pride and the solemn manners of our fathers, so that we can continue to enjoy our privileges (...). Freedom, royalty, aristocracy, democracy, prejudice, rationality, philosophy, combine to make delightful every day of our lives’, wrote Louis-Philippe de Ségur in his memoirs (published in 1824), at once adding: ‘and never such a terrible awakening was preceded by such a sweet sleep and seductive dreams’.

Ségur was one of the ‘last libertines’, as Benedetta Craveri called them (The Last Libertines, Penguin, 2020), the last before the Terror of the French Revolution: the young aristocrats who were unable not foretell any problem that could prevent them from enjoying the pleasures inherent to their social status (in the AncienRegime) with the doctrinal optimism (liberal, why not) that Reason and the Enlightenment inspired in them.

But reality is always conspiring and can hardly accommodate delightful utopias.

To keep the school open we must deal with violence and war, to accommodate and negotiate the notions of Good an Evil. The problem is that no one knows how to play the characters in which Reason or Utopia are incarnations of Good. No one wants to play the roles ascribed by those who proclaim Good because prudence recommends suspicion vis-à-vis those who are sure they know what Good is.

The rest is Evil. And here begins the curse and glory of the libertine.

The libertine knows that he does not know enough to know what is best for others. He does not know whether he is better or worse than any other. His power is to be no matter who: ‘I slept with them; I shared their condition’ [Amália sings].

With his perverse ambiguity, the libertine liberates all he meets from the discipline or the comfort of the roles ascribed to them by convention. Such is the liberating power of Evil. A horizon of endless possibilities is thus opened.

The libertine is only unable to liberate himself, but that is another matter.

We oscillate between the perverse hypothesis and the utopian hypothesis, but perhaps they are the same thing as enunciations of future possibilities. Nevertheless, there is still one last hypothesis.

The school of libertinage paves the way to a school of art in which everyone does whatever they want, and everyone asks them to do precisely that: whatever they want. That is what the curator asked the artists under the pretext of wanting to make an exhibition called: School of Libertinage.

We all know what this title means but no one knows what it says.

For that reason, artists do not make texts like these, they make artworks which we are tactful enough to pay an exceptional form of attention to.

As a curator, I could have invented what the artists wanted to say with their works, but I prefer not to rob the people that I invite to visit this exhibition of that privilege.

Further ahead, in the course of the conversation, we might think of a guided visit. But guided by whom?

Alexandre Melo