Pedro Pousada (1970) is a visual artist with extensive experience in the field of contemporary design. Its activity began in 1991. He has been a supporter of communism since 1987. He knows that the Soviet Union was not a workers' paradise, but he also knows that it was the workers' state and that the world is sorely missed. He fights for the socialization of wealth and democratic pluralism (from Business to University), which can only be realized with the supremacy of the political sphere over the economic sphere; he defends free access to education, health and culture; he is convinced that one day Lénine's cooks will rule the world and that the children of the shoemakers will write poetry. He didn't travel much but spoke to many people and saw the class struggle in action: Franco-Zionist Jews, Israelis sympathizing with the Intifada, Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats seeing themselves as Yugoslavs, surfers, anthropologists from California, Guinean economists working as baby-sitters of Finnish couples, Cuban designers who fought in Angola, Argentinian diplomats with aristocratic tics, Chilean guerrillas disillusioned with real socialism, political prisoners, genocidal soldiers who repeatedly talk about what they did to the “turras”, sectarians of all colors, Salazar mechanics, taxi drivers of all ideologies, regretted having returned to Portugal, regretted for never leaving, emigrants and immigrants, scientists with no political opinion, people looking for their first job and diverse people who don't vote and who hate democracy.

It opposes the Zionism and apartheid that is being built up in occupied Palestine with the complicity of Western diplomacy. Do you know what the battle of Cuito Cuanavale was and its role in the liberation of Nelson Mandela and South Africa. It opposes the neocolonial policies that have been defined in the Middle East since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It is well remembered how Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinszky's doctrine set fire to revolutionary Afghanistan in the eighties and bequeathed to the future that we are now experiencing thousands of jihadist mercenaries, dogs in the ranks of the takfirist monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Remember the Sandinista Front and the Farabundo Marti Front. He considers the 2003 invasion of Iraq as the tragic beginning of the XXIth century and abhors the concept of failed states and the predatory rhetoric that underlies it. Like other human beings, they are afraid of many things, of death, of the unknown, of unemployment, of illness, of amnesia, of heartbreak, of not knowing why they are here. He enjoys teaching and learning, and in his work as a university professor and researcher, he has published scientific articles in the field of art theory and the intersection between contemporary artistic culture and architectural culture. But when he does what he does, he doesn't think he's an artist and he has a lot of doubts about what that could mean today.
 

Meta-physical part (formulation of concepts)

In the last twenty years (1993–2013) my artistic work developed in an intuitive, asymmetric and asymmetric way, a set of premises that I can define based on two excerpts. The first is a comment by Walter Benjamin (Zentralpark, Fragments sur Baudelaire In Charles Baudelaire, un poète lyrique à l'apogée du capitalisme, Paris: Éditions Payot, 2002, p.228.) on the poetic physiology of Charles Baudelaire: the “anger of bursting into this world to destroy and ruin his harmonious creations”, the shock emerges, here, as a strategy to problematize the migratory and ancient condition of the human subject, positioning himself between the barbarian (the worst of us, the the disconnected and the incomprehensible) and the sublime (the unapprehensible, the heroism of silence, subjectivity crushed by the intensity of the object, intensity that is no more than the subject revealing himself); the second excerpt I found in Gothe's Faust (helped by Mikhail Bulgakov and his Margarida and the Master) and it is the Devil who speaks answering this question: “Who are you, anyway? — I am part of that force that eternally wants evil and eternally wants good.” This exhibition project is an intersection of graphic narratives about the contemporary neocapitalist building and specifically about the naturalization in our daily lives of the biological foundation of life - death, the destruction of the other, the werewolf of man, disorder as a program of salvation from the established order. For this very reason, it presents itself as an artistic criticism (understood here as the “dialectical negativity” of creative destruction) of the reconciliation of classes (the Trojan horse of extermination) and is an attack on the idea of intropathy (the explored contemplates the suffering of the explorer as part of his suffering, and the explorer in his strategy of reproduction and continuity invents an intrinsically different humanity in its social mobility but equal in its suffering and mortality); Walter Benjamin defined this concept as a factor of ideological weakening of dominated in relation to the dominator, of those who produce (and consume) in relation to those who organize accumulation by dispossession, of those represented in relation to representatives (the central problem of our democracy).
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Methodological Part (How do I do it and critical self-reflectivity of what I do)

In my artistic work, a large part of it consisting of drawings, a methodology has been recurrent in which what is drawn (articulated between the figurative, the informal and the abstract) is not exactly what is drawn or just what is drawn. It seems like a tautological inversion (the drawing is a drawing that is not just a drawn thing, or the drawing, a visible thing, it is just one of the layers of the sense of the design) but it has been a concern to think about how and if it is possible to rescue the graphic narrative from the burden of the clichés of mass culture (despite the stylistic neighborhood I am not making comics or telling a story and above all I want to enhance the semantics of the recognizable and the unrecognizable, the possibilities of association and disruption of logos and the intuitive, of the hermetic and common sense). I often think of the monologue from Kafka's Lair when I try to rationalize my artistic practice. The dissimulation, the hiding, the obsession of the monomaniac inner voice, a prisoner of the same point of view, unable to distance itself from itself, the fear of enemies outside and inside, the cult of the beating, the robberies, the terror of isolation (of imperfection) but also its comfort (the distance from the experience of others). My drawings have a side of loss and punishment, they are an anthology of proprioceptive ways of drawing, of acting graphically where pleasure can quickly transform into nausea, tiredness, disbelief: I know where I start on the sheet, I know that I use accidents, that I risk, improvise and manipulate the unexpected, but I often feel that what prevails is not so much the power of the process, but the redundancies and graphic constants, the compositional disharmony, the pathos of the full, the excessive, the noise. I accumulate and relate images and the experience becomes the annulment, through the believable, the familiar, the lived.

This Project also has the ambition to assess how I can extract from this excess a totality, a narrative that brings the visual instruments (the drawings) that I use, that I mediatize, closer to the world in which I live. I understand them as symptoms that are blurred and devoid of the rationality with which we represent everyday life as “yet again” or “again”, as one that is always the same and is deformed to the point where the end (obsolescence, dementia, old age, death, finitude, and the dissatisfaction of only our own terms) is already a beginning. I draw thinking about this, that this will end and that this disturbing promise that “nothing will make sense” (because we are no longer remembered by anyone) is the natural, organic invention of another sense in which we are no longer needed.

So I often try to get the part (the detail, the biography of the gesture, the autographic stain) to speak of the whole, that the invisible and the complex are metaphorized by the stereotype, that the diagram explains the “free disjunctive association” and in which the “inner voice” (my ideas, my head and its ills) reverberates the oral history of the anonymous (of the many anonymous people with whom I have spoken to learn to speak to myself) of our modernity (specifically at the end of the 20th century Portuguese, colonial, post-colonial, peripheral, eric, European). George Simmel affirms in his text Bridge and Gate (Brucke und Tur, 1909) that humans are the only part of nature capable of separating, dividing an object, a thing, and that they do so conceptually even before doing so materially: the world appears to us as irretrievably divided parts. Art perhaps (I insist on perhaps) is the attempt to appease the awareness that the one and the indivisible do not exist; on the other hand, responding dialectically to the desolate perception of a divided and barbaric world, aesthetics indulges in a double game as a strategy of forgetting and hiding the repugnant but also as a work (of thought, of the world of ideas and of the world of forms) about the apoetic because it does not solve human (philosophical) problems, not being a guide to action (corrective, transgressive) to the contradictions of To live, to the imperfections of saying, without therapeutic properties in relation to the physiology of desire, the insatiable, the uncontrollable, the vertigo of death, she, aesthetics, like communism, is a returning specter.

Pedro Pousada
May 2015