João Pedro Vale

João Pedro ValeLisboa ¶ 1976

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

He studied sculpture at the FBAUL and earned an advanced course diploma in Visual Arts at the Maumaus School. The most expressive reading venue for his work is the American notion of achievement, which brings together art and sports and transfigures the work of art through the fascination with the artist's skills. Skills are that which become the most outstanding feature when we think of Bonfim (2004), a fishing boat covered with what reminds us of the traditional Brazilian Our Lord of Bonfim wrist-ribbons, or of A Culpa Não é Minha (It's not my Fault, 2003), an iron tree wrapped in rope, or even in initial works such as Can I Wash You?, a sort of coin made of blue-and-white soap bars, and Please Don't Go, a carpet made of chewing gum, both made in 1999, when he began his career. ¶ The relationship between art and physical performance becomes quite explicit in works such as Lick My Balls or Beefcake, from 2000, both associated with sports and also evocative of a certain gay imaginary, present in his works since the very beginning, in a militant or, yet more frequently, emotional stance. ¶ Proposing, insistently so, a neurotic revisiting of the Disney universes and Hollywoodian paradigms, João Pedro Vale (re)produces Dorothy's dress (Dorothy, 2001), devoid of its body, Ancient Roman quadrigs and other props from the love triumvirat between Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony and Cleopatra (Fatum Nos Coniuncturum Est, 2003), Sleeping Beauty's palace - which we learn that actually belonged to the infamous king Ludwig the 2nd of Baviera, under the name of Neuschwanstein (I Have a Dream, 2002) -, Pinocchio (When You Wish Upon a Star, 2001) or Scarlett O'Hara (Scarlett, 2002). ¶ Although these works trigger an ironic mechanism, content-wise, in formal terms they also produce a drive towards the amorphous and the undifferentiated, clearly breaking away from its cultural context and the associated commentary, in order to witness a Faustian inclination and a morbid obsession that becomes evermore tangible as also the more contrasted the corrupted motifs become.

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