João Nora
Blow Up - Imagens de Realidade
Published in: Art Notes, nº 14, March 2007
In recent times painting has had its change and adaptation ability before new realities and paradoxes of contemporary world recognized and extolled. The ambitious international collective exhibitions are the reflection of this comprehensive trend and it is not unconnected or indifferent to Portugal. We could highlight the proposals by João Nora (Cantanhede, 1979) among the heterogeneous whole of Portuguese young artists approaching painting from a reflexive attitude as a manual practice, an aesthetic values holder that hardly make sense when associated to an idea or project. He was graduated in Painting at the University College of Arts in Coimbra (ARCA-EUAC), and between 2004 and 2005 he attended the advanced course of visual arts of the MAUMAUS in Lisbon. He has regularly exhibited since 2000, highlighting his involvement in the collective Projektraum - The Art of Critical Thinking and Transmuting Experience: Film and Video (Kunstraum, Innsbruck, 2005), as well as his individual exhibitions at the Room Post-Ite of the building Artes em Partes (Iconmarché) and at the space [410] Showroom of the gallery Graça Brandão (Mimesis Project), both shown in Oporto in 2006.
In the project Mimesis the artist showed a series of three pairs of identical big size paintings, close to the advertising look and based on photographs of supermarkets, signing and dating each pair at the same time. Although the double pieces were carried out starting from the same photographic image, João Nora decided on deliberately considering each one as "original" legitimating this quality by means of a certificate of authenticity while the other was designated as "copy of the author". This factor, very important in the art market, was taken to its logical conclusion when defining different values for the pieces. The represented motifs, mass and industrial production consumer goods one can buy at any hypermarket, emphasize the exploration of the artist on the relation between the original and the copy and the subtle link between the artistic value and the economical value. What is more, the fact of exhibiting and contextualizing a project of this kind in a gallery, primary space of the art business, provokes the questioning of the monetary valuation and manipulation of the artistic object mechanisms, since, in this case, it was the artist himself and not the gallery owner the responsible for the commercial concept of the proposal. So we have the idea of art trade as the own artwork before us, as the reflection of the economical game set up around the artistic creation, whose commercial value is conceptualized here. In fact, João Nora's conceptualization of the financial aspects of the artwork gives his proposal a critical vigour not aimed at attacking the art system. On the contrary. It is assumed as the integrating element of the capitalist machinery of the market, playing with some of his opinions and principles to configure a parodic mirror of the (present??) situation of contemporary art regarding the investing fever on the unique artwork and the lack of economical rationality.
Next June the gallery Graça Brandao will open the most recent initiative of the artist, R Project, a series of paintings that already enjoyed a brief preview in the last edition of ARCO. Again, resorting to the visual perception and oddness so as to challenge the spectator to make use of his/her intelligence. A first approach to the work denotes a feeling of curiosity which will lead the observer, regardless of his mental indolence degree, to try to decode what he is seeing. That's why there is an initial difficulty and a necessity of a textual support whose information - one more component of the project - will turn the act of looking into a complex and intellectual action. In fact, the construction process of the images and the devices determining their contemplation are shown in a catalogue-book that acts as the bridge between the supposed abstraction of the paintings and the final understanding of their sense, between the pictorial language of the hyper-realist expression and the conceptualism, underlying intention in Mimesis Project.
João Nora sets this piece into an ideal plane, designing a physical-mental map whose outline configures the letter "R". Once the itinerary to be examined is outlined, he carried out a photographic campaign in which all sorts of white vehicles became the attraction objects. Some fragments were selected, isolated, extended and transfigured into painting starting from the resulting photographs, making easier the masking of the global image identification by means of a blow up effect. This use of the abstract potential of the surrounding reality formally connects with some pieces of Noronha da Costa and Ângelo de Sousa. Nevertheless, one can notice the deliberate contention of his technical abilities. There is no excessive display but there is a balance between sensibility and thought.
Fernando Montesinos
João Nora
As the King Midas
Published in: L+Arte, nº35, April 2007
What is the image? Where is it´s value? How does it legitimize in the social level? And commercial? The works of João Nora play with questions and answers. (...)
(...) A sociology of art made most of them with canvases, paints and brushes? Or a work that focuses on aspects of the sociological theory of art? Sometimes video and installation. The system of art is challenged, its structures, institutions, its modes of delivery and acceptance. Testing the notion of authorship, the viability and recovery of the author circuits in commercial, institutional and social, recalling the questions, always present, around the legitimacy of the artistic object, using the ownership, rereading the phenomena of the History of Art - signing up in a long tradition, from Manet, through Duchamp, to the situationists and conceptualists - the artwork of João Nora has been stated above by a practice still testing the limits of plastic, pictorial and expressive of painting.
Constant in conversations held with the artist are the issues and not the answers. They rise in a spontaneous way, but being then submitted to a process of conceptualization, of intellectual consideration, reflected through writing. For João Nora, that is the process that defines what his real work is. (....)
(...) The art does not answer. The art questions. In Nora’s work is the system of art that is questioned, tested, confronted with their perversities, limits, contradictions. The commercial circuit, his operators, transmitters and receivers. The golden aura character of the work of art. Or its assignment? The widespread confusion between what is and what is not. And what leads to be. And who says it is. (...)
(...) There is a modern look. A flanerie that feeds and encourages the artist towards reflection. That requires him to write, investigate, to find solutions to test. They’re not features, or rather, aesthetic or purely formal functions, which lead us to find parallels or points of contact between the work of João Nora and of other artists. They are attitudes, positions against the system of art that lead us to enter the artist in a line of disruption, of structuralistic reflection, which brings back some ideas of Jan Mukarovsky, on the art as a semiological fact, depending on the standard and the aesthetic value as social permisses and, of course, the obvious relationship between individual - creator and receiver - and the artistic object. (...)
The authorship is a central point in the work of João Nora. In the video Transmuting experience, already mentioned, the artist reminds us others that assumed also the self reflected process - Helena Almeida, Bruce Nauman -, shows up in the studio, painting a self-portrait, confirming the practice of painting, building up, projecting its validity to the two-dimensional plane. Affirming its existence, his authorship. This being the central concept in its path. (...) João Nora shows us this as we talk with him, in the works we have seen, in games that creates traps and misunderstandings which he aspires to carry out. (...) As a King Midas. What touches becomes gold. As the canvas painted that worth for his own.. Only because he is artist. (...)
Pedro Faro
João Nora
A propósito de MySpace
Published in: Art Notes, nº 25, January 2009
The first time I came into contact with Joao Nora’s work was in April 2006 on the occasion of the opening of Projecto Mimesis at the Show Room of Graça Brandao gallery in Oporto, and since then I have been interested in the work of this artist that, without rejecting the realist and sensory tradition of painting has got to develop a series of proposals in which he intelligently conciliates the good deeds with discourses with a conceptual background.
MySpace is the concretion of the second part of the trilogy started with the project previously mentioned, where he started to tackle the question of authorship from processes and pictorial experiences of a great exigency and calculating mood, incorporating painting within other media not as a sort of hybridation but as a resource related to the idea of original and copy, and the persistent reflection around the legitimation mechanisms of the pictorial image –in principle unique, original and unrepeatable- in the context of the contemporary art market.
The starting point of MySpace, a project with an assumed collective character, was in May 2007, with the recruitment of the graphic designer Tony Fortuna, the creator of a flyer in which the following question was raised: gostas de fotografar? André Santos, the roadie of the rock band Bunnyranch, was the person in charge of distributing the leaflets in the premises where the band was performing and, from there, among all the people interested in taking part, six were selected by the own artists through a short questionnaire. The aim of this collaboration consisted of taking photographs of scenes, moments and people in different spaces and context half-way between the private and the quotidian with dispensable cameras costing 25€ each; these images that turned to belong to the ideologist of the project. The conditions were simple and clear: the artista provided the work material, paid a monetary value in exchange for the photographical capture of isolated moments and the six selected artists would sign a statement with the transfer of the rights on the resulting images. After a careful selection of them, the atelierwork was unleashed and, with it, a pictorial process that uses photography as the starting point and is finished at the gallery space, a commercial platform -since it provided the stable and favorable atmosphere of the exhibition, the selling and business of the art pieces- and discursive -since it is here where the message of the project makes sense and vigor; it is here where the oils and watercolours share the leadership with six document- books helping to decode the ‘back office’ and history of the programme. One per each person that transferred the visual fragments of their experiences.
One of the most individual features of Joao Nora is his ability to raise questions to the spectator and establish friendly dialogues between past and present regarding the work of the artist. In the specific case of MySpace, the whole project responds to the most pure spirit of present time: in the Net, brief and disposable. On the one hand the own appointment of the project alludes to the homonym and well-known web site on social interaction, founded in 2003 and made up of personal profiles of users including the networks of friends and relatives.
In the attractive and seductive world of the Internet, faithful to the culture of the ephemeral, the rivals appeared soon, the last one was Facebook, the present and most important one among the social networks and it won’t be he last one for sure. Anyway, in this field, talking about projects lasting more than five years is strange, or rather miraculous. On the other hand, the use of the ‘flyer’ as a way of spreading the project also seems to appeal for the perishable, a sort of advertising that, let’s be sincere, always ends up in the ground, handled roughly mercilessly. Disposable Art, of a quick consumption, a product of our industrialized and capitalist society. And we should not forget the intervention of the invited ‘photographers’, whose working tool was a disposable camera…. An object the captures the transitory, the wish to remember the lost moments with scarcely meaning for their holders. The fact of moving those images to the canvas and paper as the printings or reminiscences of the life warmth means crystallizing the traces of the reflection of a certain reality. The exploration of the existence of divergent views on the same reality (reconstructed by the artist) is, by the way, another of the main leitmotiv of Joao Nora’s production.
MySpace –a collective art work, since collective was the modality adopted for its concretion and there were many actors-makers- blurs the concepts of authorship and medium. Who is the creative officer? Do we really see paintings, picture-photographs or pictorial spectrums of photographs? The connection and reverence without excesses to conceptual art and hyper-realism is inevitable. You only need to refer to John Balderssari and his Comissioned Paintings (1969), a series of paintings exhibited with his name, but executed by amateur artists and ‘sign painters’ from photographs taken by Baldessari himself; and also to Chuck Close and his reticulated and pixelled portraits, real photographs executed with paintbrushes. In both cases, and also in the case of Joao Nora, the aim is not to reproduce the realist character of photography but, and despite the exhibited for the spectator, to formally be a painting, although the subjacent essence is the photographical one. Are a photograph and a painting really the same thing? Is great art painting above all? Does the future of art depend on stopping aggravating the ego of the artist? These and other questions are raised in the Project MySpace.
PS: The exhibition hides the last secret. There is a photograph hidden disguised as a painting, with the same size and format than the watercolours. What would be their price?
Fernado Montesinos
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