Nathalie Obadia is delighted to be presenting the second solo show by Vasconcelos in the Paris gallery.
After the exhibitions organised in 2008 (Où Le Noir est Couleur, Galerie Nathalie Obadia) and 2009 (À la mode de chez nous at the Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian), which revealed to the public what are now emblematic works by this artist - Cœur Indépendant Rouge #2, www.Fatimashop, Contamination - this new exhibition is an opportunity to see new pieces that she has conceived specially for the gallery.
Joana Vasconcelos has already explored the status of women in a number of visual and plastic forms (Madame du Barry, Marilyn, the chandelier made of tampons, A Noiva), and here she returns to the feminine universe in the form of that supremely domestic space, the home.
In close collaboration with an architect, working from plans and technical drawings, the artist spent several months conceiving and preparing a genuine "loft" that will transform the exhibition space into an intriguingly complex, shifting habitat to be explored by visitors.
Living room, kitchen and toilets will all appear, while from the walls protean tubular elements pop out, deconstructing the established notions of interior and exterior.
We then enter into an ironic meditation on our society of the spectacle which, through the triumph of reality television, has confirmed the abolition of the frontier between public and private. Reflecting this display of the private, electrical wiring, plumbing and other functional elements will be exhibited, as if magically transformed into ornate, colourful textile elements.
This organic, playful proliferation will be capable of re-enchanting a domestic space that can sometimes be alienating.
Loft is the main work in the exhibition. It is made up of eight partitions with different surfacing: marble, granite, azulejos, stainless steel, wood panelling, staff, mirror glass and glass. Divided up into several rooms, the space is crossed by strange, colourful tubular forms. "I'll never tell, not even the walls," sang Amália Rodrigues, the great voice of Portuguese Fado, herself quoting a popular expression that Vasconcelos enjoys playing around with here. The guts of privacy now take the form of architectural entrails linking the different spaces. These abstract bodies in fabric produced by the combination of traditional craft activities - sewing and crochet - with industrial materials, provoke a strange feeling of familiarity.
Other recent works by Joana Vasconcelos will also be exhibited.
The Song of the Gargoyles: the Portuguese word "canto" evokes both singing and the notion of the "nook." This private, exclusive space is summoned up here by walls covered with azulejos from which protrude gargoyles made at the manufacture of Viúva Lamego, which is famous in Portugal for its work with artists. From the mouths of these gargoyles, whose repulsive faces were usually meant to ward off evil, there emerge snakes in coloured material which bore through the partitions.
Two boxes, Rear Window (Marble) and Rear Window (Granite), covered, as their names indicate, with green marble and granite, hang on the wall at face-height, like windows or paintings (once viewed as windows onto the world). From inside these boxes, tearing the rigid surface of the marble and granite, unrecognisable and abstract textile forms burst forth. The titles of these works evoke the voyeurism that features so prominently in Alfred Hitchcock's famous Rear Window (1954).
Goutte and Psycho are works that revisit elements of bathroom furniture. Where Goutte appropriates a small washbasin, the arrival and evacuation pipes of which are invaded by crocheted textile forms, Psycho exhibits two shower heads attached to the wall and spouting, not water, but a hanging tube of baroque textile. Once again, we are reminded of the Hitchcockian intertext, in this case, the famous shower scene from the eponymous film in which the female heroine is stabbed to death in her shower.
Loft challenges the lifeless structures of domestic privacy. "The walls have ears," warned an old Persian proverb. Here they express a deep, hedonistic desire to manifest life, in which the absurd and the surreal vie with the organic and the biological.
In keeping with the artist's characteristic creative processes involving the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of everyday objects, Loft puts forward a discourse observant of contemporary idiosyncrasies. The dichotomies artisanal/industrial, private/ public, tradition/modernity, and popular culture/erudition get shaken up while nature asserts its ability to reinvent the habitual flux of signification.
Joana Vasconcelos is one of the most acclaimed artists on the international art scene today. With a mixture of nostalgia and irony, she probes the identity and popular culture of her home country. Her sculptures and installations draw inspiration from kitsch and traditional Portuguese imagery and provoke thought about the taboos on female sexuality, the role of women and consumer society.
Born in Paris in 1971, she lives and works in Portugal. Over the last fifteen years her work has featured regularly in group and solo exhibitions in Portugal and internationally.