Small text about No. 3 / No. 13

No. 3 / No. 13 is the title of one of Rothko's paintings. This title, as applied to the exhibition, has a sole intent that is to assert the show in the path of the appropriative gesture. This exhibition by Ana Cardoso defies notions of language appropriation, style and derivation by its own means. Matisse and Popova are revised and somehow linked by the artist. Constructions made with paintings are tried out in the gallery space as much as paintings become objects, parts or construction pieces. All paintings have two sides. Some act as screens. Some of the lamps that lighten the paintings are very close to them. The show gathers five general series: Meditation, Surprise, Taped, After... and Monochromes. Most of the paintings are made on sewed fabrics, joining different materials: linen, nylon, cotton, wool, silk, etc... Plus acrylic paints, with much gold and iridescent.

Some think that the process, not the image, will reveal us something through what we see. Then the image is this fortune cookie, an abstract of possibilities.

The series Meditation addresses the idea of Buddhist emptiness. Surprise is a series that uses stripes as its main motif, as in wrapping paper. Taped mimics previous paintings tape debris. After… uses other people’s paintings and remakes them. Monochromes acts as an anthropomorphic punctuation.

No. 3/ No. 13 also includes a printed digital scan made with studio debris.

Painting is about painting.

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LINK:

Flash Art Online

Editor Nicola Trezzi writes

HIPPY HOLIDAY

on Joao Simoes’ closing reception at Emily Harvey Foundation

HIPPY HOLIDAY

Nicola Trezzi on Joao Simoes’ closing reception at Emily Harvey Foundation

NEW YORK - As the Bernadette Corporation put it, “New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.” This certitude was heralded once again on a night when I found myself on Broadway, following an invitation to the mysterious closing reception of a tentacular project by Portuguese artist and architect Joao Simoes at the Emily Harvey Foundation.

Before recounting the events of that dark night I think Harvey (who passed away in 2004) deserves a few lines: according to the website biography she was “a strong individualistic child, an instigator” (basically everybody’s dream!). I think that these feelings were invested in the gallery she opened in 1985 in New York exclusively devoted to Fluxus, Conceptual Art, Mail Art and Performance, which has shown people like Robert Filliou, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier and LaMonte Young. Then she married a Venetian man and started a new branch of the gallery in Venice, which apparently after a period of inactivity will reopen next year under the vision of Simoes, who for this show in New York has literally received carte blanche from the foundation head Christian Xatrec.

Occupying for 3 weeks this odd cultural identity on 537 Broadway — whose space, with large windows and wooden floor, seems a smaller and more extreme version of the neighboring Swiss Institute — Simoes activated a series of film screenings, collaborations and happenings as crazy initiatives that are as technically low profile as they are conceptually strong. Witnessing the last day was an experience: in the center of the room a series of synthesizers and keyboards were spread out like a big octopus; in the center a series of sound performances were manoeuvred by Stefan and Sergei Tcherepnin (with a clown nose), eventually accompanied by artists Amir Mogharabi and Robert The. Later on, this almost insane performance was interrupted by Fluxus veteran Jeff Perkins, who started speaking of how Yoko Ono and John Lennon spent their time screaming at one another and who then culminated his turn in throwing paper towel and paint from the stairs. In that moment I realized that the common toilet sign “PLEASE FLUSH THE TOILET” was certainly invented by a Fluxus Artist!

Following Perkins was an even more surreal performance by Taketo Shimada, who created live a brick-a-brack CD player that produced a melodious noise for a petrified audience. Concrete poetry, oxymoron, divinations… here we are!

Rendering the night even more exciting was a painting collaboration by Ana Cardoso Jacob Kassay and a very special couple of films: Ann Craven’s wonderful and all-is-full-of-love Shadow, which featured the artist’s cat projected onto the decays of Shimada’s arrangements, followed by the Lisbon Film by Amy Granat and Emily Sundblad.

This ongoing Swedish-American collaboration, simply entitled Sundblad/Granat film (finally a slash female competitor for Guyton\Walker?), has already proliferated in several places: from Kunsthalle Zurich, part of Bernadette Corporation one-year project “How to Cook a Wolf,” to Castillo/Corrales, under the name Les Femmes Qui Dorment; from White Columns to the next screening at Filles du Cailvaire in Brussels. In this new European art-magnet, opening on February the 7th, the female duo is planning to present many of them, including the latest Lonesome Cowgirl (filmed in Tucson and inspired by Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboy) and Turkey and Lobster Film, showcased the day of thanksgiving when they prepared, with a beehive on the their head, a delicious dinner for a circle of close friends. Their stage: Broadway 1692 gallery, which is the third place on Broadway where Granat has presented her work — The Saints, a film she did following Steven Parrino’s testament, was premiered at the Swiss Institute a while ago…

Underlining the “timeless situation,” the Lisbon Film — starring Granat, Sundblad and curator Mathieu Copeland and filmed in Lisbon where Simoes has his headquarters TEST (http://00351.org) — could have been done yesterday as in the ’60s or the ’70s… or maybe next year, why not? The atmosphere and the treatment of the film is enchanting, beautifully ruined.

Simoes himself was always directing, presenting, introducing this “holograms’ rendezvous,” with the attendance of artists John Armleder, Maï-Thu Perret, Ei Arakawa, Matt Keegan and Tom Burr, curator Anthony Huberman, art critic Adrian Dannat and a crown (I assume) of real insiders. The climax of the night was reached when my fav-above-all Jutta Koether approached me saying that she liked the juxtaposition of the ladies with Barney’s shopping bags, which read “have a hippy holiday,” combined with the presence of the earnest old-school hippies. In this cool-smart (Cologne Style!) perception of such an event, she kept saying that now that the balance was tipped — when the ladies with the Barney bags had left — she was definitely ready to sneak out… no better end to such a soirée.

Anthony Huberman, Maï-Thu Perret, John Armleder, Jutta Koether, Ann Craven, Amy Granat, Jacob Kassay and Ana Cardoso; Amy Granat and Emily Sundblad's Lisbon Films, created during the meeting in Lisbon for TEST project in February 2008.

PRESS RELEASE

SOUTHFIRST 60 N6th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.southfirst.org

SOUTHFIRST: PRESENTS

SPACE STUDY

ANA CARDOSO

7 November – 14 December, 2008

SOUTHFIRST gallery is proud to present SPACE STUDY, the first New York solo show of Portugese artist Ana Cardoso. The exhibition consists of nine large-scale paintings and a number of smaller interventions which assemble to create an installation that maps the gallery space through two- and three-dimensional signs and displacements. The exhibition will be on view from November 7 – December 14, 2008.

SPACE STUDY began as an animated video “sketch” of SOUTHFIRST gallery and the plan for a black-on-black invitation card. In her show, Cardoso plays with the dual presence of paintings as objects and signs to create an architectural space in which literally free-floating references collide. Themes of the paintings include translucent fabric with different warp and weft, 1970s social theory book covers, and voracious pop cultural and art historical quotations including Fragonard’s “The Swing.” Michel Majerus, Heimo Zobernig, and Cosima von Bonin might be artists whose approaches to the legacy of painting make them relevant to Cardoso’s approach to the problem of making art, which Cardoso suggests is a kind of performance.

Ana Cardoso received an MFA from Hunter College in 2006. She has shown most recently with E-Flux Video Rental at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and at VPF Gallery, Lisbon, and in St. Louis, Missouri as a part of Cinema Zero. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Lisbon.

SOUTHFIRST is located on 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Gallery hours are Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 1-6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact the gallery at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.

SPACE STUDY and MONOLOG available at Printed Matter, Inc. 

(art and artist editions bookstore, NYC)

http://printedmatter.org/

VOGUE Portugal, nov'08 issue

PRESS RELEASE

VPF GALLERY Presents
Ana Cardoso: SANS IMAGE
25 Sep – 8 Nov 2008

for immediate release

“What does Rousseau say without saying, see without seeing? That replacement has always already begun; that imitation, principle of art, has always already interrupted natural plenitude; that, having to be a discourse, it has always already broached presence in difference; that in Nature it is always that which supplies Nature’s lack, a voice that is replaced by the voice of Nature.”[1]

It is never easy to write about an image. Words and Images are what one may call intimate enemies. It all stems from a family feud, for once they were one. Words were images, i.e. ideographs. Symbols. The theological unity of the transcendental and the material object was, however, disrupted when the alphabet got invented.

Plato still made an attempt at restoring that broken unity, by choosing the word ‘eidos’, which literally meant silhouette to signify ‘idea’. Unfortunately, adjustments made to the supra-structure never affect the infrastructure, though Plato wouldn’t know it since he was no Marxist. He achieved something else, notwithstanding. He managed to distort the ancient theological unity into a relationship between appearance and essence. Art History is the History of such a relationship. All images, which thereafter partake in the history of Art History are the accurate description of all the possible forms that relationship may assume. Outside of Art History lay the remains of the old symbolical unity. Anthropology calls them animistic beliefs and psychoanalysis calls them the narcissistic state of omnipresence of thoughts. Voodoo dolls and other items of cultural kitsch. For all of us who know perfectly well that a signifier is never identical to what it signifies –except perhaps when carving our beloved’s name in a street bench- it is also perfectly clear that neither words nor images have any power whatsoever over the things they represent. Besides the power of representation, that is. And within the new hierarchy the power of representation establishes the images always occupy the lower echelons. To know means to possess, even if it is a possession in the transcendental sense, through one’s consciousness. That is why Art Images are images, which convey a discourse, rather than images, which are discursive. They hide their secret deal with the viewer, the private entente that always already makes them readable. For their role as images is precisely to signal their belonging to that very discourse. Yet, while doing so they also annul themselves as images. For they annul their very possibility to signify a rupture in the linearity of language or in the representation protocols. Such images have thus, no ‘destiny’ as images.

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

Such are the words of San Soleil’s fictitious narrator. In Sans Image, Ana Cardoso, while trying to understand the function of representation, finds a notion of abstraction which is not the opposite of representing but rather it’s lining. Through her negative images we can thus Access the negative of meaning production, which is not alike no-meaning but rather the impossibility of making meaning become stable.

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[1] Derrida, Jacques in Of Grammatology, 1967

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Ana Teixeira Pinto
Berlim, Setembro 2008


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A relação com Sans Soleil é incontornável. A exposição chama-se Sans Image que, livremente retirado do livro "Le Destin des Images" de Jaques Ranciere explica para mim um conceito e atitude em relação às imagens. As pinturas na exposição têm diferentes direcções e a sua instalação tem uma importância espacial e não convencional.
Há uma imagem roubada a Courbet, que é um fantasma da imagem original – 2 mulheres deitadas numa cama; uma paisagem usa a ideia de a Abstracção ser sempre uma imagem; há pinturas aparentemente concretas ou abstractas que contornam ou ligam imagens, representações residuais.
Não consigo definir uma imagem porque algumas hipnotizam e o significado é uma superficie opaca.


Sans Image, Conteúdo Negativo


"SANS IMAGE", SÉRIE EM PROGRESSO, INCLUI TODAS AS IMAGENS COM QUE TRABALHO. REPRESENTAÇÃO E ABSTRACÇÃO SÃO NÃO IMAGENS.

Fazer assegura um ponto vital. Por meio da improvisação, transmutação e disfuncionalidade da imagem, a pintura cria um lugar indefinido onde a sobrecarga de informação exclui o pensamento linear. O que é a imagem? Qual o conteúdo? A abstracção é um estado mental, uma forma de expandir categorias genéricas.

Uso o arquivo de possibilidades da História da Arte. Mas a "colagem" auto-referencial, a identidade que ensaia não-imagens, desinforma. O fazer e refazer despe as imagens de conteúdos pré-definidos, coloca-as numa situação de carimbo, alinhamento e presença.

"Sans Image" aplica-se a qualquer imagem de conteúdo negado - processo meditativo que revela uma imagem fantasma.

Esta negação assume diferentes formas através da interpretação de textos, ideias ou momentos históricos. Interessa-me a mistura do construtivismo com a arte pop, ou da pintura europeia do final do séc. 19 com a estética punk. Se o conteúdo negativo é ao mesmo tempo "demasiado ruído sobre nada", é também uma chave para o panorama da pintura actual, uma experiência ultra-complexa, onde o conteúdo é apenas o que não conhecemos, o espaço residual deixado pela inteligência. O desafio é uma imagem não-representável, simulacro ou tensão porosa e abrangente. Neste momento, ver a reprodução de uma paisagem equivale eventualmente a olhar para riscas pintadas. Ver é um jogo social, representação em tempo real, subordinado ao contexto.



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An Interview

Int: Why do you call this show (Sans Image) a group show since it is in fact a one-person exhibition?

AC: Because images are appropriated, they're briefly mine, maybe never. And soon never again... they are randomly taken from History and then back to its tracks.

Int: And, why Sans Image? Are you driven towards the anonymous?

AC: Not really… Sans Image refers to a lack of reference and a frustration in pinning down the world through images, our substitute for language and a potential place for creativity… if/when it happens.
It is a show about nothing, actually. A meditation…

Int: On the impossibility of clearly expressing oneself…

AC: Well, more or less. The impossibility of not being able to express oneself through the boring task of coherence…

Int: I see…

AC: I think images, like most families, are dysfunctional although they gather like particles – it is a mystery.

Int: And you are also attracted by this magnetism.

AC: I am. I see painting through this perspective – images have different dynamics, like quantum physics! I am attracted to images I don’t quite understand – images that devolve some mystery or just strangely relate to your actual thoughts.

Int: Thank you!

AC: My pleasure.



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ANA CARDOSO: SANS IMAGE
VPF Cream Art Gallery, Lisboa
25 Sep – 8 Nov 2008

Space Study editions

Space Study, Negative Content
by Ana Cardoso, New York, 2008

(cover & back cover)

Space Study editions

Screenplay

LINK/

Portuguese Perspectives On Art In New York, Berlin, And Lisbon

Conversation between Ana Cardoso and Ana Teixeira Pinto, in NY ARTS Magazine \ May-June 08 issue

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