The Art of Joana Vasconcelos

 

Joana Vasconcelos was born in Paris in 1971. She lives and works in

Lisbon.

The nature of Joana Vasconcelos’ creative process is based on the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities. Sculptures and installations, which are revealing of an acute sense of scale and mastery of colour, all combine in the materialisation of concepts which challenge the prearranged routines of the quotidian. Starting out from ingenious operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the ready-made and the grammars of Nouveau Réalisme and Pop, the artist offers us a complicit vision, but one which is at the same time critical of contemporary society and the several features which serve the enunciations of collective identity, especially those that concern the status of women, class distinction or national identity. From this process there derives a speech which is attentive to contemporary idiosyncrasies, where the dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to renovate the usual fluxes of signification which are characteristic of contemporaneity.

Coração Independente Vermelho

(Red Independent Heart) is a huge Viana heart patiently filled with red plastic cutlery. Suspended from its axis, it performs a circular rotating motion, evocative of the cycles of life and the eternal return, accompanied by the sound of three expressive Fados, Estranha Forma de Vida (Strange Form of Life), Gaivota (Seagull) and Maldição (Curse), interpreted by Amália Rodrigues. The title is taken from one of the verses of the first Fado, written by Alfredo Duarte (aka Marceneiro) and Amália Rodrigues, whose lyrics invoke the conflict between emotion and reason. By multiplying the use of ordinary plastic cutlery to the abstraction of its original form, the initial references appear transfigured by new, suggested social and artistic schemes, exposing the artificiality of borders outlined between luxury and vulgarity, popular and erudite culture.

Coração Independente Vermelho (Red Independent Heart) presents itself as a powerful and emotive installation of sound and kinetics, dedicated to love and passion.

Cinderela

(Cinderella) takes the form of an elegant high-heeled sandal, whose augmented scale results from the use of pots and their lids. By displaying pots ranging from the common rice cooker to the larger ones

used in hotels, the work of art remits to the absent figure of a giant Cinderella. The unlikely but assertive association of cookware and high-heeled sandals, two paradigmatic symbols of the private and public domains of Women, proposes a revision of the Feminine gender in light of the practices of the contemporary world. The use of pots, symbol to which we would associate the traditional domestic dimension of Women, to reproduce a huge high-heeled sandal, a symbol of beauty and elegance required in social performance, contradicts the impossibility of the dichotomous relationship of the Feminine gender in the domestic and social scenes. The Gulliver effect and the monumentality of the

represented object erupt as panegyrics of female duality, hinting at the full achievement of individuality through the subversion of imposed social conventions.

Technical Details

Date of Issue: 16 September 2013

Values: stamps of 0,50 and 0,80€.

Acknowledgments: Atelier Joana Vasconcelos

Designer: Illustration / Folk Design

Photos: dmf / Damião Malhão, Fotografia / ©Unidade Infinita Projectos

Printer: Cartor

Process: Offset

Size: stamps: 30,6 x 40,0 mm

Souvenir sheet: 125 x 95 mm

Perforation: Cross of Christ 13 x 13

Paper: FSC 110 g./m2

Watermark:

Sheet: with 50 stamps