The long title for this exhibition by António Melo immediately highlights the particular relationship that this artist establishes with time. A painting slow in its execution, delightfully anachronistic, because it is always out of time but, therefore, provocative in the way in which it challenges our relationship with contemporaneity.

In this exhibition for the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, António Melo presents us with painting, drawings and video. Here the video takes the place of the performance, to the point of being the performance itself. And the author is explicitly present there, as if he were really there.

Assuming the possibility of the conjurer artist, António Melo leaves us above all a melancholic atmosphere like Buster Keaton, in an imaginary that is both wonderful and deceitful.

“Images idealized in steam” like everything in art, in this organic relationship with things, in these mechanisms that prolong the mind and body like a breath.

The comfort, as well as the familiarity with which we relate to his work, lead us to believe that this really exists, that his perception involves recognition rather than strangeness.

And so it is, kindly, that her painting appeals to the pleasure of the fantastic, disconcerting and anachronistic, but to an absolute anachronism, which brings her closer to the symbolist aesthetic experience.

António Melo dilutes in the landscape what is architectural construction, artifice. And he confesses that it's not exactly fantasy that motivates him, he even believes that one day the landscapes will be more or less like this.

He believes that nature will only survive through artifice, which I think is perhaps the same as saying that it will not survive at all. This is not, for António Melo, exactly a bad thing, not least because he always considered the representations of Nature more interesting than Nature itself. Maybe the future could be a kind of Disney landscape, but better.

On his canvases, the cities engulfed by vegetation, mosses, fungi, are perhaps not a catastrophic vision of the future but a kind of construction similar to the ruins invented by the Romantics, to soften the discontinuities between the natural and the built.

In this “incomplete compendium of rhetoric and performance”, rhetoric is that of images, or images taking the place of rhetoric. But “and performance” rhetoric. Perhaps most of all performance. In the age-old question between form and background in painting, the performance of a Mona Lisa who camouflages herself in the landscape.

António Olaio
April 2013