Heading West (…and keeps on going)

António Olaio’s work has always reflected a non-conformist attitude, marked by a freewheeling relationship with the visual arts. To him, performance art, painting, video and music make up a common ground in which the acts of making, painting, writing music or displaying oneself combine as a platform for exchanging messages and reversing meanings, where the word, sung or written via a variety of techniques, particularly painting, attains a poetic and sometimes disconcerting power, between irony and its connection with the cliché Olaio is adept at discovering in its confrontation with reality.    

‘Heading West’, the exhibition he brings to the Appleton Square gallery space, exemplifies the possibilities his virtuoso skills manifest as they explore universes that are seemingly close to the idea of reality at which his work aims. But António Olaio is an artist who draws us to borderlands, be they or not close to that accent on reality that seems more apparent in his paintings than on the video piece he presents on the gallery’s second room. The paintings, which explore combinations of grays and blacks, depict young people (perhaps his students) standing on pedestals that are also their projected shadows; their facial features, however, are out of our sight since the figures’ heads are out of the frame. These are not headless figures, but characters who incarnate the drift ‘Heading West’ conveys to us. A drift of thought and imagination that disengages itself from corporeality and the presence of the gaze as a poetics that sets off in many different directions, and is heightened via the visual dialogue between these paintings and the words in the song and the sentences on the gallery wall. The video piece, in which Olaio performs music co-written with João Taborda, his longtime musical partner, brings us back to that paradoxical approach to the portrait, which once again exceeds the frame size. A huge close-up shot of a face, which we eventually come to recognise, thanks to certain details, as the artist’s own, an impression further confirmed by the sound of his voice in combination with rock sonorities, as an electric guitar fills in for the body that conceals itself outside the frame and the words move freely across the gallery space, further conveying to us the previously mentioned drift: ‘feeling the southern breeze on her cheek’.

In this exhibition, Olaio returns to his amplified universe, interweaving references and techniques that discreetly recombine Pop and post-conceptual approaches into an irreverent stance that is also aware that art goes beyond a style or affiliation, being a serious commitment in which freedom follows poetics, even when it unveils a risible, near-caricatural aspect that acts upon the days that drift by.   

João Silvério
February 2015

credits © photodocumenta