“For a place that assumes a museum room, [Manuel Valente Alves] convenes three personalities that could never be crossed: Giorgione, through its famous The Storm, dated of 1509, Paul Gauguin, through the title of a missing work of 1897, Bernard Hermann through a photo that frames a text by John Barry, published in Newsweek magazine in 1995. He quote them but with a subtle variation. Giorgione, copied in the same format, is a replica built manually on canvas, using acrylic and not the oil as a medium, which imposes no obvious change of hues and tones. And on the surface of the glass box containing the work [Manuel Valente Alves] installs is a deviant disorder: the name of the work it is not The Storm but Future Shock. In relation to the photograph, its expansion and isolation of the magazine body, before responsible for its normalization, involves the photography in a scenario of representation, also deviating. Chafer it an outdoor frame and is called Storm.
Alone, reduced to the literality, the title of Gauguin’s painting will evoke for the amateur its splendor, but it becomes another thing: exactly the ‘sense’ organizer of this puzzle of crossing quotes, unrolling and mixing functions, poetics and techniques. That is, re-inscribing these elements in a new place which is the one of Valente Alves.
So this installation in its exhibitioner sharpness, it is a third degree construction: the first defined by the works in itself – an oil, a printed photo in a magazine sheet, a title –, the second by the appropriations that reconstitute them – the modes of presentation, the exchange of legends, the de-contextualization of Gauguin’s phrase – the third, finally, by the signifier that unites them, reloading all previous ones: the world is threatening but the core of this threat is concretized in the devastating action of the power. [...]
With this work Manuel Valente Alves continues one of the most insistent paths of today. To cancel merges between painting and photography, and between the appropriate images of one and the other, to spread senses and poetics, to select and transpose plastic media, to inscribe and transmute successive realities in an other real that interrogates its own transpositions, to re-situate artistic practice in a broad cultural space in which the word is a significant link, and thereby to provide it with political, social and ecological intentionalities, make it a director of a celebrant and interventional dramaturgy. Where the public can find signs of recognition of itself and its situation. And a call for action.”
Raquel Henriques da Silva, in: “Where do we come from? What are “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going to?”, we? Where are we going to?, exhibition catalog, Chiado Museum, Lisbon, June 1996, Portuguese/ English
