Cut-and-Pasted Contradictions
The work of Barreiro, Portugal-based collage artist João Fortuna is multi-dimensional in both form and iconography. The reinvention of paper and photographic collage in the artist’s work is entirely original, with each individual element adopting multiple physical and symbolic facets. Fortuna works within a new field of neoclassicism, extracting fragments from the recognizable timeline of art history and layering, cropping, and reassembling until what emerges is something simultaneously dismantled and reborn. This accumulation of cut-and-pasted contradictions makes perfect sense considering Fortuna’s constant reflections on the flaws and failures of contemporary society, which in the scope of the artist’s work, often bring about both fatal catastrophe and the rise of new voices and ideas. Fortuna’s maximalist architectural collages are meant to overwhelm, they are meant to capture the maximalist echo chamber of material and expression we endure in the crowded spaces of art, politics, and the world at large.
Part One who is João Fortuna?
Question #1: Who are you?
I grew up in a small village in the north of Portugal, but today I live and work between Lisbon and Barreiro. In the past there is a degree in History of Art, a master’s degree in Museology and numerous trips that took me to visit countries with India, Palestine, Jordan or Morocco. Today I work as an artist focusing my work on 3D analog collage.
Question #2: Who are you as an artist?
As an artist, I always try to convey a message, I feel that this is the purpose of art. All of my work is a critical reflection of our time, mostly a reflection of the dark and absurd side of the world in which we live. The works that I create have become my form of intervention and claim and it is from them that I communicate with the world, it is my ‘‘ scream ’’ frozen in art form.
Question #3: In terms of your artistic journey, why are you here and where are you going?
Well, art is really what moves me, I feel it is my way of communicating with the world. I always wanted to transport my works to the world of street art, where in one way or another my works would become part of the city and communicate directly with people. That is one of the objectives …
Question #4: What do you absolutely need your audience to know about you or your work?
It is a provocative and demanding art. My work always starts with the need to talk about a subject, usually political or social issues. This is always the starting point for creating my artistic narratives, I always try to approach the topic as clearly as possible so that the message reaches the observer.
What is your artistic practice?
I work with collage using a technique of superimposing images in depth. My massive paintings are built by layers of wood, in each of these layers there are collages of a vast number of images that you look for on the internet, or that I stage and photograph.
These layers are represented plastically by the three-dimensionality of the paintings, which are constructed through narratives of the contemporary universe, full of contradictions and extremisms. Through its slow assemblies, the observer is immersed in a complex universe where there is no space for emptiness. The works are populated by small images that build antagonistic and paradoxical scenarios, we see in them violence and the search for peace, pain, fear, prejudice, garbage and human garbage.
In 1793 Jaques Louis David, paints “The Death of Mart”, where it represents the moment when the French revolutionary was murdered in his own home. Today I take the character out of his context and transfer him to our era. In my painting Marat is surrounded by electronic waste, with a phone and a computer in each hand. In an apocalyptic industrial environment, my character dies because there is no more internet in the world. My “Marat Disconnection” is a reflection of a society stuck with screens and wi-fi. And if the world went from one moment to the next without internet ???
In 1830, Eugène Delacroix, painted “Liberty guiding the people”. Today I take the characters out of their context and transport them to our era. In this new context, my “Liberty” leads a universal revolution, infinite and without geographical barriers. A common shout that is never heard.
A war that started in 2011 and that involved several countries around the world. There are about 6.3 million refugees, 550 thousand dead, of whom 20 thousand are children. The war continues and the world continues to look to the side, “it’s just another war…”
Appropriation of the iconic work “Whistler’s Mother” from 1871. In this reflection on loneliness, I present “Mother” alone in a crowded room. This room where the walls are filled with forgotten memories, of saints and Christs who save nothing, of books and magazines that are nothing more than ornaments, because the “Mother”, like so many others, never learned to read. Sitting next to her table full of medicines, she looks intently at her only company – the television. Outside, the modern, fast, colorful and bright world follows as if it were nothing, because the world has also forgotten it. I finished this painting in December last year without knowing what awaited us in 2020. Today, words like isolation, distance and loneliness fill the news. But was it not always so? In 2017 the Senior Census revealed that 45,516 elderly people in Portugal were in a situation of isolation or loneliness.
| Where/ How can Vacant Museum viewers see more of your work and where can they purchase it? |
| On my instagram or facebook – @ joaofortuna.studio. The site will be launched later this year. |