Documents of Innuendo

With the following artists:
Gil Ferrão, Pedro o Novo, Vera Matias and Vera Midões.

text by Guilherme Figueiredo,

Imagine this:

You are walking through a neighbourhood and everything seems as it should. There is light hitting surfaces and there are human figures moving slowly. Trash overflows onto the sidewalk. Some walls are clean and some others are covered in mud and scribbles. You start relaxing into the normalcy of things. You slip into a state of aloofness while walking, and so, you pass through the figures, walk along side the walls, across the trash and the light reflections and never notice that they are fake.

You have documents in your hand, a hard briefcase full of categorised aspects of daily life and you leaf through some of the folders. The first you pick talks about the archaeology of Pedro O Novo's characters. It says and you quote: “Toughness overflows through the street’s depiction. These are simulations of what reality sounds like. But they never stretch out enough to ever make you doubt about its veracity.” You think to yourself, painting can do that, it sends you in the direction of simulation and of fiction, but never too far off as to not let the silhouettes turn into blurred shapes... You start imagining a foggy landscape, ..the distances here are important. The distance between the surface and the passerby. Distance between fact and supposition, between fiction and flesh.

You look at the people you thought to be alive and they appear now as cardboard cutouts, the trash is a prop.

You get shaken up, but decide to grab another folder from the briefcase. You look away and take one at random but the file falls on the floor and opens by itself. You kneel towards it and start absorbing the presented page: “The muscle tissue has been easily torn from the asphalt. It has turned into gruesome imagery splashed onto the concrete. The banality of a street has projected itself onto the floor outside." You lose a small grin out of your face and think to yourself The shadows of the people get projected onto the floor and acquire the asphalt’s grainy texture. Each step, or each movement, feels like a photography developed on the concrete’s surface. You continue reading “...therefore every bit of surface on Vera Matias’ paintings leave no doubt to its materiality and intent. It’s the crudest aspect of an innuendo. A suggestion made of mud.”

You look around your back and notice that everything that belonged to your previous point of view and thought static is, in reality, in a frenetic state of speed and confusion.

You start looking at the walls with suspicion. Assuming they have a trick or an illusion to it you get closer to inspect. Running your hand through the scribbles they seem permanent, nothing is losing form like the previous experiences and so you go search for the folder about walls. You reach the W files and start browsing, ...walkway, walkyrie, walky-talky, AH wall! “Anarchy is made while building the structures. Each brick a message. Vera Midoes’ diagrammatic architectures are built by fire. An ever changing state of change. The walls aren’t canvases or at least they are not prepared for it. They are menaces to the equilibrium of infrastructures” You abruptly stop reading and think, Planning threatens chaos and still there wouldn't be one without the other. You look again at the scribbles on the wall and observe its chaotic organisation, ...Walls are exactly that, tons thought to the millimetre, — main material being order — and, even then, they are used for chaos in a chaotic manner.

Eyes squinted, you slowly look at the walls to confirm the changes and, as you predicted, it suddenly starts peeling off a skin-like object. A gelatinous surface that brings all drawings and dirtiness attached ends up falling and bending in front you in the floor.

This was expected, you knew something like this would happen and don't look half as fazed because of it. The street is crumbling around you. You start walking along the wall. Eventually a new street is presented to you. It looks the same as the last one was, but prior to the changes. You walk into it shaken. Thinking back on it everything was a dud and a trick on your senses. You look at your hand, the briefcase is gone. The documents have disappeared.