Facts that remain

The title: diante de mim, mais demorada do que nunca, points above all to the image as a fact, the image with something that really is. Something that will be before you, or before “me”, referring to this subject, in the first person, to the author himself, or even to the spectator who, by being so, is updating this condition of having something in front of him. Or “me”, this “me” that takes over the body of everyone who sees these images.

They are paintings that are intended to be images of images, which reproduce what was seen (and which persists, for a long time). Images “in front of me”, really. Which will certainly take “longer than ever” because they are painting. But that, by affirming this condition, they affirm at the same time an objective origin, but of moments that last indefinitely.

And in this condition of being itself (something that is before our eyes, those eyes of “seeing to believe” and not those that capture appearances) objectivity is underlined here by the affirmation of bodies, the affirmation of bodies by the marks of violence, the affirmation of their anatomical condition, by death, or by the way in which the idea of still life here takes on a literal meaning.

In a way, João Nora tests the possibility of the cancellation of memory, suggesting moments that remain present. As if the course of time did not give rise to the succession of events, but where each instant remained. Not giving way to another, but maintaining their presence, in an immense density of simultaneous realities. There, before our eyes, to the point where there would be no more memories, because everything would remain, objectively. Perhaps the mind itself would be transformed into something else when it saw its capacity to remember stripped of any meaning.

And the work of art as a device for densifying the objective world. Their images as facts, as facts whose objectivity is enhanced by the fact that they remain.

António Olaio
Coimbra, January 2, 2015