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

THE ART OF JOÃO VILHENA

Maria João Fernandes *

"Rest your face against melancholy and not even hear

the nightingale. Or is it the lark?

(...) It is within you

that all music is bird." Eugénio de Andrade.

Celebrated Italian painter De Chirico (1888-1978) reinvented the concept of melancholy associated with a metaphysical aspect in the history of art, generating a whole tradition to which João Vilhena's work belongs today, while taking into account the differences in time, style, and format. His photographs, in a way, are not really photographs, as contemporary art has taught us to understand, but rather portraits of an intimacy that communicates with space and mirrors it, reflecting a consciousness carried by the waves of the desire to Be, to love the transient beauty of a light that is both ephemeral and the pure image of eternity.

The melancholy lies within the invading shadows of the sparkling space, it lies within the consciousness of the moment, when one witnesses the decline of the light that veils the appearances of pure brilliance, of the brief breath of infinity.

In João Vilhena's art, photography is close to painting, reconnecting with another great tradition of 20th-century art, since the American Stieglitz (1864-1946), but at the same time it becomes autonomous through its link to a reality that has the blood of poetry running through its veins.

His creation feeds on reality and nourishes it, it gives it the elixir, the divine essence of a beauty that belongs more to the realm of the spirit and less to the realm of appearances, which nevertheless exist there, in a "for oneself" and a "for the other", with a phenomenological meaning, in a flow and an osmosis of intimate and external worlds, which are resolved in enchantment, in a sweet sadness that seems to have no reason, when the reason vaguely hovers carried by the whiteness of clouds or by the surprise of details that softly shimmer to remind us that we belong to this world.

Do we truly belong (to reality)? The insistence is voluntary. This is what all these images seem to say silently or in a whisper, ultimately composing a timeless