[open the box] António Ole

The pieces that make up its many surfaces contain the whole lexicon of the streets: zinc plate, bits of wall, windows and pieces of doors, wooden partitions, the remains of layers of paint, and coats of paint one on top of one another. These are fragments taken from houses and places, from remains of what was once a dwelling, but now mixed in with the story of the great mystery of western painting that lies in the abstraction created by Mondrian, Kandinsky and Malevich around 1910. The monochrome planes on the vernacular surface of the wall contain an exact view of the dichotomy between the real and the abstract that makes up the art of the 20th century, but it also contains a more epidermic and humanist notion that the colour field that painting sets up can be as easily found as produced; as it is at the moment of the aesthetic encounter with the work and its place that the recognition that forms the artistic process is produced.

Yet António Ole’s poetic vision starts off from another device: collage, a process introduced by Picasso and Braque in 1912 that consists of bringing elements from the physical world (a piece of wallpaper, a chair seat) onto the surface of the canvas. This bared the process of fiction of the images produced by painting for the spectator to see. If the history of painting rested on the belief that image is formed within its rectangular support, thus asking the spectator to accept the trompel’oeil of perspective, the inclusion of “real” elements in painting dismantles the mechanism before our very eyes, forming a distance towards the process of belief in the image. What António Ole produces in his enormous walls is the development of this process: there are paintings in the middle of the real waste that make up the palimpsest of the work – which challenges the realistic dimension that the truth of the supports might make one believe at first glance and then suggests a different, more universal and symbolic solicitation to us.

It symbolizes the complexity of reality, the multiplicity of places and surfaces, of walls and colours that define the dwelling, the building of a city and the course of history. It symbolizes the slim frontier between subjectivity and reality, the blur between art and life that is the stuff of António Ole’s poetic view.

When we are looking at the large wall that brings us the city we recognize, without our having seen it, what peers out is the rigour of painting, the Utopia shown by Malevich when he decided to paint the city of Vitebsk in colours and geometric shapes in 1921.

Biography
António Ole was born in 1951, in Luanda (Angola) where he lives and works. His work is spread over fields such as drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, installation, photography, video and cinema. He graduated from the American Film Institute of Los Angeles and the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied African-American culture and cinema. He first exhibited when he was sixteen, with his international debut being in 1984, at the Los Angeles Museum of African-American Art, after which he has exhibited in several international shows, with special note being the biennials of São Paulo (1987) and Venice (2003 and 2007), as well as the anthological exhibition at Culturgest (Lisbon, 2004). He has also participated in the itinerant group exhibitions Africa remix, contemporary art of a continent (Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Hayward Gallery, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg), and The short century: independence and liberation movements in Africa 1945-1994 (MartinGroupius-Bau, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Modern Art (Long Island City).

Bibliography
António Ole: retrospectiva 1967-1997 (cat.), Luanda, Centro Cultural Português de Angola, Instituto Camões, 1997.
Africa remix, contemporary art of a continent (cat.), Johannesburg, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2007.