Curator: Luca Massimo Barbero

On the second floor of the recently renovated via Reggio Emilia building, a bridge to the Museum’s new wing, is a solo show featuring the Portuguese artist João Louro. It is a world in which nothing is as it seems, a universe where the short-circuit of vision and language creates original expressive pathways.
For its Summer 2010 Exhibition Program, MACRO wanted each exhibition gallery to showcase a different artist, thus uniting a multitude of expressive languages and diverse worlds stimulating visitors’ curiosity.
One of the galleries of the Museum is home to My Dark Places, a solo show featuring the work of Portuguese artist João Louro (born in 1963 in Lisbon), curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. Works never seen before and specifically created for this show will be shown as part of Louro’s Blind Images series. The works are inspired by the seemingly antithetical concepts “fear” and “pleasure,” in addition to The Black Dahlia by James Elroy, and works of the Marquis de Sade. The text in the work, featuring phrases taken from written sources, and the monochromatic scheme ironically and subtly interact with one another in a way that resembles labels or subtitles. The observer doesn’t find a simple explanation or description in the text, rather a new suggestion that will open the eyes and mind to different, faraway worlds, filled with philosophical and literary citations. A simple color scheme seems almost to condense its meaning and contain unexpected aspects within the text.
The work of the artist is part of a critical interpretation of reality, the uncertainty, doubt, and complications associated with the creation of a poetic and visual experience. The conceptual art Lour’s work opens up new horizons, reaches across new, unexplored paths; something that is also seen in Louro’s other series titled Dead End. This series is composed of a series of panels with indications of roads drawn onto them. Although they are invasive, they possess the mystery of poetry, philosophy, and language. The series is instrumental for orientation in a multi-dimensional world, in which streets multiply and weave themselves together, like a demonstration of human imagination.
On the occasion of his exhibit at MACRO, Louro has produced one of his panels to be displayed in the front garden of the Portuguese Embassy in Rome, located in viale Liegi, 21, not far from the Museum.

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