The Blurred House

The body of the house, of this house, knows that others thought and did things like us. They fell and rose, opened doors, erected barriers in the decisions they made or in which they hesitated, stumbled on the silences that hide the words, rekindling themselves, sometimes with the leftovers, with the collateral of the reality they experienced, becoming strange, disconnected from themselves with gestures that are now incorrigible, jumping over the solid ground of their present and each time they did so inventing a kind of “history of alternative reality” for the true inhabitant, the true texture of the walls: “a simple thing but hard to do”.

What emerges in this exhibition is the encounter between two contingencies that are not opposing but necessary parties, that of that house-body already constituted as a social meaning, and that of a house-idea that shifts the focus of our attention, making the presence of the house, but a metabolic, dissonant, incomplete presence, that is, the overdetermination of its internality, as an audible theme intrinsic to António Olaio's artistic project.

The house thus becomes energy that moves within the paintings and videos that António Olaio presents to us, it itself becomes site-specific (the signifier staying in a meaning intramuros and of hinged doors). Repeating to make it different is an unavoidable artistic task; it basically serves to rescue objects from the void of meaning in which they live, so that they, no longer forms but pure kinetics, make what surrounds them go off the axes. This is the poetic integrity of the project that, here, in this body that became a house that became an idea, António Olaio proposes to us.

Images cannot be mirrors, they cannot be the specular game of those who see themselves doubly as a principle and horizon, but translucent containers where emotional life (the biological being) and stylization (the mechanical being) are mutually distorted as mementos mori of a creative consciousness. Yes, mortality and disorder are positioned here as active ingredients: in décalage of the floor connecting the real space, of everyday use, of the house to the interstices of a dead end space, a conditional space made from the idea of a screen (like the subject when he becomes a tenant of himself), in the black, autotelic cover that becomes an unexpected avatar dispossessing himself from the body in which he hangs, at the veillic point where the filmed feet and the “deck” of the house become the same tense story (as in the story by Júlio Cortazar), those hereditary feet that burst through the rooms as expectant testimonies that innocence grows, It travels and ceases to exist and it is that incision, what is no longer there, what ceased to be (lived and felt), it is its emptiness that disturbs us. The video of the feet drawing the floor that draws them, the painting cutting out the substance, subjecting the outline of the figure to a dance of fissures, of strange impressions, as they tell us that reality can also be an increasingly compressed and violent amalgam of “disjunctive inclusions”.

Pedro Pousada
May 2010