[open the box] Jorge Molder

Jorge Molder’s icy series Inox does not derive its name from any allusion to metal or to reflection (although this inference might be possible), but to a contraction of Innocent X, the Pope that Velázquez portrayed as fantastically fearsome, in a painting that was interpreted by Francis Bacon with even greater violence, if such were possible.

Molder also has a fascination for Bacon, as well as for the expression that the Pope supposedly whispered when he saw his portrait painted by Velázquez: “Troppo vero”.

Indeed, this expression is also used as a title for another series of photographs by Jorge Molder, TV, in a game of meanings within other meanings, in a mise en abîme which is his usual methodology.

Molder’s creative method, which involves almost permanent use of himself as a model for his pictures, lies in the construction of narratives with diffuse outlines, laden with references, allusions, quotations from other photographers (like Paul Outerbridge or Bill Brandt). In the network of relationships he invokes there is a gallery of authors with whom Molder defines a complex, sometimes almost gothic world: Dostoyevsky, E. T. A. Hoffman, Poe, Kafka, Melville, Perec, Gombrowicz, Fritz Lang’s cinema and a recurrence of the figure of the double, the doppelgänger, constructing an enormous puzzle in which one cannot make out a meaning, but rather a pulverisation of paths that are endlessly woven.

So this using of himself does not mean that his images belong to the field of the self-portrait, because in no case (or hardly any) is there an attempt to depict himself, only the use of his body to construct characters or to show metamorphoses and processes of transformation.

Molder’s characters are ghosts that haunt the world of images, often echoes of other ghosts that peopled other worlds (of the texts or the moving images) and which have survived so that we, being lost in these others that haunt us, may be a little more questioning, slightly more terrifyingly, about our homes on this side of his images.

Biography
Jorge Molder was born in Lisbon in 1947. He studied Philosophy. He lives and works in Lisbon. He has participated in many solo and group exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, among which one should highlight the São Paulo Biennial (1994) and the Venice Biennial (1999), the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and the Centre National de la Photographie (Paris, 2001), as well as the exhibition Algum tempo antes at the Fundación Telefónica (Madrid) and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, 2006) and more recently Pinocchio, in the Chiado 8 space (Lisbon, 2009). He is represented in several public and private collections, such as the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, The Art Institute of Chicago, Musée de la Photographie – Charleroi, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid).


Bibliography
Sardo, Delfim (ed.), Luxury bound, fotografias de Jorge Molder, Lisboa/Milano, Assírio & Alvim/ Electa, 1999.
Jorge Molder, condições de possibilidade (cat.), Coimbra, Centro de Artes Visuais, 2006.