Curated by João Mourão and Luís Silva, Jonathas de Andrade’s exhibition “Eye – Spark” opened with Looking for Jesus, 2013, twenty photos taken in Amman of male passersby whom the artist asks to offer a representation of Christ. How to give a face to a character who embodies incorporeal convictions, how to combine an ideal aspiration with a realistic representation? Installation Posters for the Museum of Northeastern Man, 2013, brings together images of men found through advertisements or on the streets of Recife, Brazil. One of the advertisements reads: ‘A worker wanted to depict North Eastern men on posters for the North Eastern Museum.’ Make one work hard, 2014, consists of 120 shirts displayed on freestanding wooden racks crammed like people participating in a protest. Some of the shirts display the logos of various companies, while others display political messages. They are also scarred, closer examination reveals, with wrinkles and sweat; what could have been an abstract representation of the “people” acquires a more concrete dimension through the signs of the living bodies that once wore these garments.
In de Andrade’s work, which crosses the porous boundary between aesthetic research and sociological investigation, the search for faces and bodily impressions plays an important role. The artist creates an idea of community – religious, cultural, social – through an aesthetic mediation based on images that give shape to abstract notions. In each case, he does not reproduce a stereotype but rather problematizes it by examining a multiplicity of living bodies. This approach acquires a new dimension when the artist evokes his personal experiences. The most intimate exploration of the relationship between clothing and the body emerges in the work that gave the exhibition its title, Eye – Spark, 2023, a mural exhibition of sixty-eight pairs of used men’s underwear in bags belonging (as we read in the exhibition’s blurb) “to the artist’s lovers over the years”. In this installation he inscribes, in the most direct way, his sexuality, and he affirms autobiographical mediation as one of the possible keys both to this exhibition and to his work as a whole. The autobiography also informs The club2010, which alludes to the Yacht Club of Alagoas in Maceió, Brazil, the artist’s birthplace, and features images of places of clandestine sexual encounters.
LOST AND FOUND, 2020, perhaps the most joyful piece in the exhibition, is a group of fired clay sculptures depicting parts of the male body. Naked waists and thighs emerging from swimsuits with vibrant patterns rest on a tiled platform on the ground, some in pairs or threes, as if animated by a festive choreography of desire and pleasure, experienced or imagined in places of seduction and sex. .
Finally, the retrospective included de Andrade’s film Fish, 2016, which shows fishermen kissing the fish they catch. This is perhaps the artist’s most well-known work, and each time I see it again, it becomes more disturbing. The sensation of total communion with nature, of vital beauty, does not exclude but seems to accept the imminence of death. The work suggests that the essential can only be felt through the body, and that the affliction and pleasure we seek in love can be inseparable from violence.
Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers.
