“Errância suspensiva” / “Suspensive wandering”
André Magalhães
“Errância suspensiva”
“Suspensive wandering”
André Magalhães
Exhibition
7 April - 2 June
Let’s undertake an exercise that should be compulsory for any newcomer to the art world: pick up an international art journal (not necessarily the two or three best-known titles from recent decades) and get ready to be amazed by the astounding number of "stars" who have faded away in the foam of time. It’s immediately evident that the voracious appetite for the new is the driving force of a system that continually rejects novelty as an aesthetic category, but nonetheless cynically values it in its socially and financially speculative dimension.
Long live painting! Death to painting! The YBA. Scandinavian art. Brazilian art, of course. Art of the "other" (African, Asian). The art scene in Eastern European countries. The dying gasps of modernism. The multiple feminisms. The post-digital era. Cycles and counter-cycles that can be formally and sociologically explained, analytic grids that reinvent themselves often using a re-energised lexicon, in which radicalism unsurprisingly disappears.
Few can afford the luxury of stopping and looking around them with an apprehensive sense of distance. Could other values, interests and destinies overcome this continuous search for attention? In this context, I shouldn’t, and indeed don’t know how to, evaluate the intermittency chosen by André Magalhães over the course of his artistic career. I discussed this very recently, in relation to the exhibition he staged in the Cooperativa Árvore here in Porto.
Now, in the context of the project, Right Cloud @ Wrong Weather, André is once again presenting works that he produced in the early 1990s, together with very recent works. I like this chronological spiral that confuses forms and means: painting, object-based creation and photography. In the suspensive wandering of purpose, the assertiveness of an inquisitive approach, in which the experience of life is blended with a unique way of commenting the specific gaze towards art and, by extension, towards life. Questioning the suspensive wandering of judgment, which in this case is the least important of the factors of reception. One should simply enjoy. That’s what we’re in for, and what we like.
Miguel von Hafe Pérez
