Artwork that was part of the Exhibition "The Melancholy of Shadows" // CPS at CCB // May 19th - June 19th, 2016

THE ART OF JOÃO VILHENA

Maria João Fernandes *

"You lean your face against melancholy and don't even hear the nightingale. Or is it the lark?

(…) It is inside you

that all music is bird." Eugénio de Andrade.

The celebrated Italian painter De Chirico (1888-1978) reinvented the concept of melancholy associated with a metaphysical aspect in art history, giving rise to a whole tradition that now includes João Vilhena's creations. In a way, his photographs are not simply photographs, as contemporary art has taught us, but rather intimate portraits that communicate with space, reflecting a consciousness driven by the desire to exist, to love the evanescent beauty of a fleeting light that is simultaneously the pure image of eternity.

The melancholy lies in the invading shadows that veil the flickering of space, in the consciousness of the present moment, as we witness the fading light that obscures the appearances of pure brilliance, of the fleeting breath of infinity.

In João Vilhena's art, photography is closely related to painting, reestablishing another great tradition of 20th-century art, following in the footsteps of the American Stieglitz (1864-1946). However, it also moves away from painting, thanks to its connection to a reality that carries the blood of poetry in its veins.

His creation feeds on reality and nourishes it, offering it the elixir, the divine essence of beauty that belongs more to the realm of spirit than to the world of appearances, which nevertheless are there, in a "for oneself" and a "for the other" sense, in a phenomenological flow and osmosis of inner and outer worlds that merge into enchantment, into a sweet sadness that seems to have no reason, when the reason vaguely hovers in the whiteness of clouds or in the surprising details that gently shimmer to remind us that we belong to this world.

Do we really belong (to reality)? The insistence is voluntary. This is what all these images seem to say silently or softly, ultimately composing the timeless symphony of Being that is present in all art.

The solitude of objects is our own solitude. The objects placed on stage, in the grand scene