THE GREAT HOUDINI
Curator: Jorge da Costa (Director of the Centro de Arte Contemporânea Graça Morais)
João Louro’s work is eminently conceptual. His work is assumed as a strategic device for critical mediation of reality, exploring with some insistence the excess and the power of image and the written word in western societies. Considered a critic “of the symbolic economy that defines modernity”, João Louro often resorts to objects, signs, images and real situations, giving them new meanings, even if the references he employs keep the same appearance. The use of pre-existing elements, often combined unexpectedly in order to create new realities, constitutes a structuring device of his work. So, his body of work, including the “blind images”, inherently question the visual experience, a multiplicity of meanings and senses that go far beyond the physical work for which the spectator is attracted.
The exhibition conceived by João Louro for Bragança, comprised mostly of unpublished works, is based in the strong connection between the architectural space, the museum, viewed as a catalyst for a kind of work that appeals to the architecture of that same space as another form of architecture, which is the intimate space of a house: the Malaparte’s House. It is, therefore, regarding that house that Louro reinvents this experience that crisscrosses cinema, literature and art itself.