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world of virtualities and invocations, faust and exotism, seems to be
what is required by present taste. A sensorial search of the use of
signs in dressing, thirty years after Umberto Eco have written in his
well known Psychology of Dressing, that everything is communication,
the simple fact of wearing or not wearing ties - then considered
phallic symbols, representing a specific power - as an ideological
option, an overdose of political connotations that submerged the poor
beings that wore those clothes in a sea of significant evidences.
Presently, superficiality and ludism impose their rule over the
objects, deconstructing logics more or less conformed by functionality
concepts, provoking a certain nostalgia of the hegemony of the
intellect, while undoubtedly opening, a new way to the fast and
natural acculturating symbiosis, to the traffic between cultural
areas, adding and compatibilizing elements of different orders and
aesthetical families, allowing for the conviviality of different
situations.
These are introductory words for António Conceição Júnior’s exhibition
at the Gulbenkian Foundation Modern Art Center, an example of an
innovative situation at the museological level, for not being one more
garments exhibition, but an invocation of garments in their artistic
and symbolic quality imposed by the materials, almost independently of
who is wearing them or the architectonical context in which they are
presented.
It is foremost their invocative and propitiatory capacity, in which
the spectator is inevitably led to mentally construct the
environments: sometimes sinister, others coming from the past,
costumes of ghosts, things of museums or of graves, situations that
refer to the world.
The world of the living and of the deceased, but also of churches, in
which the Baroque or the Counter-reform begin once more to make sense
again.
This proximity to the primordial architecture, first way of
controlling the surrounding environment, as said by Bruno Zevi about
garments, is a very up to date approach.
An Art that invites one’s participation, in a moment of bovine
passivity before the commercial-academic objects ( which are in its
majority the bad painting that is imposing itself for prestige reasons
in the collections of the noveau-rich), is worthy of all our
enthusiasm, and we believe, constitutes the evident sign of an
encounter of the talent of António Conceição Júnior, in a moment in
which design is announcing what is happening anew in art.
Lisbon, 30 de May
30, 1991
Sílvia Chicó
Vice-President of the
International Association of Art
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