Vasco Araújo

Vasco AraújoLisboa ¶ 1975

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

He graduated in Sculpture at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, and also completed the Advanced Visual Arts course at the Maumaus school. In his infant yet compelling career, he was awarded with the New Artists EDP Award (2002), and he was a Core Program resident in the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (2003-2004) and the University of Arts Philadelphia (2007). Among the artists of his generation, he is one of the most internationalised, with participations in the 2002 Sidney and the 2005 Venice biennials. ¶ Having installation, often with integrated video, as his main field of action, he also employs a given appropriate object, photography or text, more often than not in a dialogue between text and sound. Many of his works have Opera as its particular reference; music, often worked under diverse manners, is a decisive component of his creation. Himself an Opera singer, the artist uses visual narratives as the central axis of his creative process, a play between the real and the fictitious, sound and silence, the feminine and the masculine, the intimate and the social. Whether metaphors of personal dramas (La Stupenda, 2001) or games of seduction (Dilema, 2004), his are works that question identity and fate, problematizing thus human condition and communication. In an attitude close to a heteronymic playfulness, the author personifies himself some of his characters, sometimes recurring to cross-dressing (Diva-a portrait, 2000, and Duettino, 2002), bringing to the public arena the issue of communicability and opening up a conception of art (and reality itself) as a product of a super-stage direction. The references to the Baroque period and the very scenographic dimension of Vasco Araújo's work become quite evident in installations such as Dilema (Serralves, 2004), with portraits of the artist interpreting the language of handfans, or Recital (2002), in which he recreates the ambient of a concerto room that functions as a structural analysis of the several instances of meaning that are constituted by the images, voices, sounds and texts from the operatic spectacle. In more recent works (The Girl of the Golden West, O Jardim, The Garden), the analysis of issues such as the communication and the confrontation between social roles becomes even more politicized, pointing towards other themes, as those of multiculturalism and post-colonialism. In 2006, he was in the shortlist for the BES Photo Award.

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