“Take up Manuel Valente Alves’s hotels as a work of synthesis of in the long work of the artist from the following topics:
1) To converge in the photography record a memory that comes from painting through the landscape metaphor.
2) To continue, in this area, an experimentation that is consequent with previous works in which painting and photography were used as means to express an autonomous vocabulary not separated into genres.
3) The crossing of the image with the word (the legend) in a tradition that still could (and still in the field of painting) refer to Magritte.
4) The conceptual game that is due to the previous topic and that consists in referring to a name with an urban connotation and, more than urban, cosmopolitan, an image that is undeniably country or rural.
5) To have, in this game, the alliance of an irony of romantic nature – reinforced by the very use of the photo in sepia and of the reference to the desertified and gross landscape in its telluric consistency – the taste of minimal proposal, which on the other hand reinforces the character, as it were, conceptual of the proposal (project).
Taking these topics as some of which are immediately raised by the contemplation of these images, it would be still referred the constant presence of melancholia as a way of ‘feeling the gaze’ in the expression of J. M. Fernandes Jorge. Nostalgia (romantic) of a world that has lost its ideological value in the contemporary context doubly affirmed by the paradoxical appreciation of Novecento reference hotels, when cities were cities and non-urban areas and they had, too, an ideological value that W. Benjamin better than anyone mentioned in the famous text on Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century.
Nostalgia is always a reference to something that has been lost: in this case, what laments the loss – as much as the lament is the expression of nostalgia for excellence – is the slow disappearance of the solid references of the modern imaginary. For this reason the present series of Manuel Valente Alves introduces the dimension of temporality understood both in its historical sense and in its metaphorical sense. The series title, Hotels, referring to a connotatively space, it is applied, in the denoting plan,to time. [...]
So, it will be on the plan of a poetic that becomes legitimate to understand this series of photographs and the project that underlies it.
Poetics that begins to establish itself in the denominator of melancholy and after (in the sense that Rilke could say that nostalgia is not having homeland in time) to continue in the reference to the word and the use of the word as a matter of deconstruction (of the speech) of the sens and of associating to the verbal image (referential in this case by its own weight from the memory that the names of the mythical hotels evoke) the visual image itself that come back to discover the first, as a referential image, in measure that the word is already image.
And in that is reviewed a conceptual reflection line that in Magritte's ‘ceci n'est pas une pipe’ was indeed inaugurated in the matter of the matter’s painting and here returns by an intelligent deviation that connotes with other art memories of this century, implicating the review of certain Richard Long’s and Hamish Fulton’s proposals.
In this sense the proposal of the artist acquires an extreme quality of being contemporary face to what is actually played in the art field: how to represent memory and time, space and matter or, in other words, how to represent the un-representable.”
Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, “From hospitality as one of the fine arts”, Revista Colóquio-Artes, Lisbon, no 99, December 1993
