Decadança

JOSÉ LUÍS PORFIRIO

Review in: Expresso / Revista Atual - 21 of October 2017

With “Decadança” by João Leonardo, (b. 1974) it ends a short cycle of exhibitions curated by Celso Martins, always presented in the same space of the Chiado Museum with artists of the same generation: Valter Ventura (b. 1979) and Susana Anágua (b. 1976). The three successive productions appeared as three reenactments of different dramas: explosive with Ventura, ecstatic with Anágua and now contemplative with João Leonardo; any of them rigorous and respecting the primacy of the visual and the sensitive, something rare nowadays. A title that is a quote from Serge Gainsbourg, an aquarium where two essential books “Capital” (1867), by Karl Marx, and “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1899/1900), by Sigmund Freud,  are dipped in whiskey, a soundtrack from an interview with Marguerite Duras, and a video showing the swirls of cigarette smoke. The title interprets the whole installation, the video transforms, in a “more subtle than ever”, Leonardo's chosen material, the traces of tobacco,  the cigarrete butt, the ash, in a spiral that swings to the sound of the voice disenchanted with Duras, while Freud and Marx slowly and irremediably dissolve in alcohol citing, perhaps coincidentally, a famous book of stories and anecdotes from the late 1970s that referred to authoritarian regimes in Eastern countries. From these four elements, it is not only the spiral of smoke that symbolically involves us, but a spiral of mismatched senses and feelings, where the presence and (or) the evocation of alcohol and tobacco are essential, in a kind of contemplation of the end where everything dissolves, or crumble, where drama and modern (?) contemporary (?) art are also dissolved in a dramatic parody.