Joana Vasconcelos was born in Paris in 1971. She
lives and works in
Lisbon.
The nature of Joana Vasconcelos’ creative
process is based on the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of
pre-existent objects and everyday realities. Sculptures and installations,
which are revealing of an acute sense of scale and mastery of colour, all
combine in the materialisation of concepts which challenge the prearranged
routines of the quotidian. Starting out from ingenious operations of
displacement, a reminiscence of the ready-made and the grammars of Nouveau
Réalisme and Pop, the artist offers us a complicit vision, but one which is at
the same time critical of contemporary society and the several features which
serve the enunciations of collective identity, especially those that concern
the status of women, class distinction or national identity. From this process
there derives a speech which is attentive to contemporary idiosyncrasies, where
the dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity
and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to
renovate the usual fluxes of signification which are characteristic of
contemporaneity.
Coração Independente Vermelho
(Red Independent Heart) is a huge Viana heart
patiently filled with red plastic cutlery. Suspended from its axis, it performs
a circular rotating motion, evocative of the cycles of life and the eternal return,
accompanied by the sound of three expressive Fados, Estranha Forma de Vida (Strange
Form of Life), Gaivota (Seagull) and Maldição (Curse), interpreted by Amália
Rodrigues. The title is taken from one of the verses of the first Fado, written
by Alfredo Duarte (aka Marceneiro) and Amália Rodrigues, whose lyrics invoke
the conflict between emotion and reason. By multiplying the use of ordinary
plastic cutlery to the abstraction of its original form, the initial references
appear transfigured by new, suggested social and artistic schemes, exposing the
artificiality of borders outlined between luxury and vulgarity, popular and
erudite culture.
Coração Independente Vermelho (Red Independent Heart)
presents itself as a powerful and emotive installation of sound and kinetics,
dedicated to love and passion.
Cinderela
(Cinderella) takes the form of an elegant
high-heeled sandal, whose augmented scale results from the use of pots and
their lids. By displaying pots ranging from the common rice cooker to the larger
ones
used in hotels, the work of art remits to the
absent figure of a giant Cinderella. The unlikely but assertive association of
cookware and high-heeled sandals, two paradigmatic symbols of the private and
public domains of Women, proposes a revision of the Feminine gender in light of
the practices of the contemporary world. The use of pots, symbol to which we
would associate the traditional domestic dimension of Women, to reproduce a
huge high-heeled sandal, a symbol of beauty and elegance required in social
performance, contradicts the impossibility of the dichotomous relationship of
the Feminine gender in the domestic and social scenes. The Gulliver effect and
the monumentality of the
represented object erupt as panegyrics of female
duality, hinting at the full achievement of individuality through the
subversion of imposed social conventions.
Technical Details
Date of Issue: 16 September 2013
Values: stamps of 0,50 and 0,80€.
Acknowledgments: Atelier Joana Vasconcelos
Designer: Illustration / Folk Design
Photos: dmf / Damião Malhão, Fotografia / ©Unidade
Infinita Projectos
Printer: Cartor
Process: Offset
Size: stamps: 30,6 x 40,0 mm
Souvenir sheet: 125 x 95 mm
Perforation: Cross of Christ 13 x 13
Paper: FSC 110 g./m2
Watermark:
Sheet: with 50 stamps
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