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 *

"You lean your face against melancholy and don't even

hear the nightingale. Or is it the lark?

(...) It is within you

that all music is a bird." Eugénio de Andrade.

The celebrated Italian painter De Chirico (1888-1978) reinvented for the history of art the concept of melancholy associated with a metaphysical aspect, generating a whole tradition of which João Vilhena's creation is now a part, with all the differences in time, style, and medium. His photographs are not photographs in the traditional sense, as contemporary art has taught us to understand, but rather portraits of an intimacy that communicates with space and reflects it, like a mirror of a consciousness carried on the waves of the desire to Be, to love the evanescent beauty of a light so ephemeral and yet the pure image of eternity.

The melancholy is that of the invading shadows in the sparkle of space, that of the consciousness of the moment when one witnesses the fading light that veils the appearance of pure radiance, of the fleeting breath of infinity.

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

His creation feeds on reality and nourishes it, giving it the elixir, the divine essence of a beauty that belongs more to the realm of the spirit than to the order of appearances, although they are present in a "for oneself" and a "for the other," with a phenomenological meaning, flowing and merging with intimate and external worlds, resolving into enchantment, into a sweet sadness that seems to have no reason, when the reason hovers vaguely 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 really belong (to the real)? The insistence is voluntary. That is what all these images seem to silently say, composing ultimately this timeless symphony of Being that is the symphony of all