João Louro is an intensely conceptual artist, one whose intensity is shown in his presentation and interpretation of the world, in his musical phrasing of experience and in his commitment to bringing things to their limit, through a stunning unfolding of calculated tension and control.
The thrust of the project that João Louro presents in Venice borrows the title of a song from the Velvet Underground – I’ll Be Your Mirror. Louro sets out an overview of his career, of his artistic and cultural convictions, his concerns and aesthetic and sociological decisions. Through elements taken from Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Louro builds his own world according to the traces that his readings, music and the cinema have left in his path; fusing these traces he builds a sort of autobiography, a personal diary, in which the texts or events are charged with meaning. He reiterates his questioning into the meaning and symbolic efficiency of the image and language, using invisibility or erasing as strategies to remind us that access is denied to us and that the spectator is always a part of the work: the work stands as a mirror, granting the spectator with the main role.
The works created specifically for the Portuguese Pavilion and which have been extraordinarily well adapted to the space in each room of the Palazzo Loredan Library, highlight the concern that João Louro has always shown in generating new semantic aspects and raising doubts about norms accepted by our visual culture, as well as in converting the spectator's role into that of a participant, creating invented places and imagining scenes and inhabiting words that allow us to cultivate our deepest desires and aspirations.
In these creations Louro emphasises the visual language and its methods of expression, and considers interpretation as a form of communication between the work of art and the spectator, attempting to constitute new spheres of thinking in order to feel, reflect and interchange.
João Louro's conceptual work is a questioning about the limits and the expressive capacity of the image, reflecting outside the narrow margin of the work of art itself.
María de Corral (curator)