João Pombeiro on "Roundup #9: The Best Artists on artreview.com This Week"
"Our guest critic, the independent curator, critic and regular reviewer for ArtReview magazine, Laura McLean-Ferris, makes another selection of outstanding artists on artreview.com. See her selection here.
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Moving swiftly on, João Pombeiro is from Portugal, and studied at ESAD, in Caldas da Rainha, where he now lives and works. Continuing with the theme of that which refuses to die, we find his work peppered with the kinds of ‘branding’ styles that we have come to expect from artist like Damien Hirst or Daniel Buren, which now come back to rest on everyday domestic objects. The stripes on this chair certainly look like the work of the latter.
João Pombeiro, Chair, 1998
And this first aid kit the kind of motif used by the former…
João Pombeiro, 1st Aid Kit, 1999
This seems to be almost an exercise in 'putting back' these objects and symbols of the everyday into their original domestic context, and examining how they've been changed by this transformative process. Perhaps a clue is to be found in one of Pombeiro's text pieces: a circle of text which states: 'Every art definition follows a circular logic' – and perhaps this is the final stage in the circular process. Pombeiro has a solo exhibition (titled, unsurprisingly: Meaninglessness), which has just opened in Lisbon Galeria Paulo Amarro for those of you planning summer trips.
João Pombeiro, Landscape, 2000
This scrambling of references works like a virus, creating a humorous dialogue about meaning and meaninglessness in art. Does such pilfering strip the colour, shape or work of content, or is meaning and content created in the process? In Landscape for example, both the landscape itself and the history of landscape painting and photography gets scrambled together along with references to artists who used jigsaw puzzles in their work: Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Georges Perec are two that spring to mind.
João Pombeiro was born in 1979, in Leiria, Portugal. Studied Visual Arts in ESAD, Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Lives and works in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.
His practice encompasses several different media, raging from painting to sculptural interventions and including video and web design. However, whatever the mean of expression used, one can note a constancy of problematics that arise from an analysis of the scopic regime of mass culture that characterizes contemporary society, carried out through the recycling of the tendencies and genres of post-war fine arts, among which visual poetry and pop figuration stand out.
In fact, the artist’s creative process rests on two strategies based on an awareness of the excess of images defining today’s everyday life: on the one hand, there is the appropriation of symbolic elements populating the western imaginary, whether these are films, advertising brands or others; on the other hand, there is the transformation of the materials appropriated to a logical of irony, which not only subverts its original principles but also converts them into objects with other meanings. (Excerpt from a text by Miguel Amado)
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
-"Arquivar Tormentas", CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
-“VideoEvento”, International Academy of Art and Media studies, Turin, Italy -"AC#7 / DV#1", Espaço AC, Lisbon, Portugal -“Project Room”, C.A.V., Coimbra, Portugal. -“Introspective Exhibition” 1997-2004, Galeria 24b, Oeiras, Portugal. -“Hollywood Revisité” - Indymedia, Nice, France -“PØRTUGÅL: 30 artists under 40”, Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway. -“Expect the World Moi non plus”, Sparwasser HQ, Berlin, Germany.
PUBLICATIONS:
-"Young Talents" article at L+Arte Magazine. -"Arquivar Tormentas" Catalogue, Edited by CGAC. -"25 Frames per Second", Book edited by PLMJ Foundation.
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
-PLMJ Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal. -CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
