Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Namiki-Dori Downtown Hiroshima

Image caption
JOãO PENALVA

Namiki-Dori Downtown Hiroshima

  • 2005
  • Digital print on paper
  • 203 x 133 cm
  • Cat. F_102
  • Acquired in 2006
By:
Isabel Tejeda

João Penalva’s work encompasses numerous techniques, along with complex and varied messages. Japan’s history and landscape have featured in different artistic projects throughout his career, an example of which is the Namiki-Dori Downtown Hiroshima photograph (2005). In Addressing the Weeds in Hiroshima (1997) Penalva, with the help of a botanist, studied the weeds that had grown through the cracks in the concrete near an old factory that made uniforms for the Japanese imperial army in Hiroshima. The factory remained nearly intact after the atomic bomb and was turned into a makeshift hospital. He staged a site-specific work there in which he placed information posters and panels to identify the 32 foreign and native species found with their names in Latin, Japanese and English. The botanist gave Penalva a herbarium with all those species before he returned from that trip. This led to Small Weeds from Hiroshima (1997), his subsequent site-specific series.

However, Namiki-Dori Downtown Hiroshima seems to be directly linked with the series of photographs of overhead cables and pylons that he took in Osaka. That led to the Looking up in Osaka (2005-2006) project, exhibited at the Simon Lee Gallery in Hong Kong in 2013. The cables, loops and pylons generate dramatic dark, zig-zagging lines against dark coloured skies in the background. Even though photographs are used from the technical perspective, the artist claims that this is a pictorial project and is ready-made art. In the first case, he sees the cables as drawings in the sky that he has only framed and cropped. In the second, he just uses and exhibits everyday items that are so much part of the scenery that they go unnoticed.

As is usual in the discourse of this artist, Namiki-Dori Downtown Hiroshima seeks to show an alternative way of perceiving the world: one that forces us to look up to the sky rather than down to the ground. The items that we take for granted, that go unnoticed in the everyday settings of the civilised world, become our main focus. Frames are generated that tend towards abstraction for the viewer to interpret.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
João Penalva
Lisbon 1949

João Penalva trained as a dancer at the London Contemporary Dance School in the early 1970s, but he soon tired of it as he felt he was merely carrying out the orders of others and often disliked being forced to constantly work in a team. Consequently, he embarked on a second career as a visual artist at the Chelsea School of Art. In his early days as a painter, Penalva sought to move away from the theatricality of his previous context to find solitude and creative freedom in his own studio, and was inspired by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

However, after more than a decade of painting that was often defined as non-narrative he was feeling the need to reinvent himself to avoid his work becoming a sort of easily recognisable brand. He thus gradually added narration, theatricality and new languages into his discourse by means of words, installations, photographs, videos, archives, found objects, etc. He also felt the need to work with other people again and his studio, which had previously been a creative refuge, became an ‘artificial’ work space. Thus, in his own words, his head and mind became a new mobile studio. All these circumstances have resulted in a great variety of forms and concepts in his artistic discourse. However, there are recurrent traits, such as the philosophical and poetic use of the combination of words – written and even spoken – and images to tell stories. The text, image and sound complement and/or contradict each other by mixing fragmented real and imaginary facts and descriptions in which the interpretative freedom of the spectator plays a fundamental role. This type of output questions the way in which we perceive things through works where nothing is what it seems and the imagination of the reader/listener is encouraged to transcend reality.

Since 2002, Penalva has combined his work as an artist with lecturing at the Malmö Art Academy at Lund University (Sweden). His work has represented Portugal at the São Paulo International Biennial (1996) and the Venice Biennale (2001). He has also held solo shows at venues including the Camden Arts Centre (London, 2000); the Rooseum (Malmö, Sweden, 2002) and the Ludwig Museum (Budapest, 2005). His group exhibitions include shows at the Tate Modern (London, 2014); the Seoul National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2012); and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2001).

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.