Luis Serpa (1948-2015)

E/O from Joao Vilhena on Vimeo.

The irony of life and death

Luis Serpa and I curated and produced a seminal multidisciplinary art show in 1983 (Depois do Modernismo), along with Leonel Moura and Michel Toussaint Alves Pereira. Thirty years later (2014) I had the privilege to restart a collaboration project with Luis Serpa.

I invited Miguel Palma, João Vilhena, António Carvalho (aka Toyze), João Bacelar, Rui Martins, Gonçalo Pena and André Sier to show their work within a curatorial framework called An eye for an eye, a mind for a mind.

Other artists, specially young ones, were on the pipeline for further projects. The next program would have been dedicated to women artists.

On January 16, by the time we were closing the first year of our renewed collaboration, Luis told me: “I’m done, I have ELA” (ALS).

We had three meetings, on March 27, April 2 and 10, about a new tri-dimensional art magazine called BAU.

We also talked about two shows that Luis was curating for Museu Soares do Reis and Biblioteca Almeida Garrett, both in Oporto. His arms and hands were practically dead. He was also losing voice in a worrying pace. “I have no pain”, Luis told me. “My hands and my speech are not responding”, that’s the problem...

I was supposed to meet him tomorrow, April 17.

Last Monday I got an e-mail about Luis. He had to go to hospital. I hoped for the best.

Uneasy sentiments came on board.

So long Luis.

BAU—layout for a 3D art magazine

Vintage 85

Vintage '85 (installation view)

VINTAGE ‘85, two paintings inside Chambre Ardente @ MOSTRA '15

Ninety three young and mature artists are showing on a pop-up show curated by Patricia Pires de Lima. MOSTRA '15 takes place in an empty 50's building soon to be refurbished.

MOSTRA '15 follows a loose curatorial criteria. There's horrible stuff next to excellent artworks. It seems to me as an irresistible swarming against the zombies of bureaucracy and commercial art. Art products are also suffering from excess capacity and huge inventories—waiting for a turn of events as demand seems to freeze everywhere.

My work at MOSTRA '15 is two-folded: three inkjet pictures of the exhibition room done with a smartphone, that you can see online (and buy any or all the one-off prints), and two 'in situ' small 'abstract expressionist' paintings from 1985. I display the two paintings as vintage artworks. The room where I show them is like an art cellar to me. I call it Chambre Ardente (burning chamber).

First, I developed an archeology derivative of the site. Than I used the soon to be destroyed office room as a subtle ritualistic chamber to visually and mentally taste two paintings never shown before.

Have a look until April 19th.


My Works

Vintage '85

• Installation view 
• Em si, 1985 
• Vintage '85—No smell, #1, 2015 
• Vintage '85—No smell, #2, 2015
• Vintage '85—No smell, #3, 2015

Some artists in this show that I liked

• André Sier
• Elisa Pône
• Luís Alegre
• Marta Alvim
• Miguel Palma 
• Rui Sanches
• Teresa Braula Reis
• a few more...

MOSTRA '15
10-19 April 2015
Venue: Rua Centro Cultural, Lisbon.

Portuguese news on this event

• Observador

Lynda Benglis

Just to put things where they belong

As two heavily made-up women take turns directing each other and submitting to each other’s kisses and caresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the camera is their main point of focus. Read against feminist film theory of the “male gaze”, the action becomes a highly charged statement of the sexual politics of viewing and role-playing; and, as such, is a crucial text in the development of early feminist video.

“This video is Benglis’s emphatic response to the notion of a distinctly feminine artistic sensibility and to the belief in a necessary lesbian phase in the women’s movement—ideas that were often debated in the early 1970s.”

—Susan Krane, “Introduction”, Lynda Benglis: Dual Natures (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1991)

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

—in Video Data Bank (video)

Centerfold by Lynda Benglis published in Artforum magazine, 1974.

 

Lynda Benglis by John Baldessari 

@ Interview, March 2015

JOHN BALDESSARI: The first thing I want to say about you, Lynda, is how much you've been an influence on me, all the way back to when I first started going to New York in the late '60s and '70s and I saw your work at Paula Cooper Gallery. They were showing your poured pieces. And jumping forward to today, I know how much of an influence you are for younger artists. I have a young protégé, a student of mine, who is very much influenced by your idea of materials, rather than art as some abstract thing. And I know when we both taught together at CalArts, what a huge impact you had on the students. For that time, you were a real Angeleno. [laughs] You went to all the openings.

LYNDA BENGLIS: I think the only time I went to your house for a little get-together, I thought my Porsche was a bumper car. I banged up the front and back of it getting to wherever I was going. Now, I was trying to think of when I first saw your work, John. It was before I met you. Was it your first New York show at the Feigen Gallery?

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Benglis in a 1974 photograph @ Wikipedia

Wikipedia on Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis on Pinterest