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António Conceição
Júnior is a true poet of dressing, through his sensibility
and creative capacity.
Since the first time I saw one of his fashion shows, I
was able to understand that I was facing an innovator, a
creative man who utilizes his important cultural past to create
pieces that bear a very personal style, combining East
and West elements in a symbiosis of rare beauty.
Antonio Conceição Júnior has accustomed me, in the shows
I have seen, to permanent surprises.
Sometimes sumptuous, other times depurated, this creative
who is equally a painter, designer, illustrator and
photographer, has always arisen in me a great interest on his
work, which I follow even from far away.
He is undoubtedly the Portuguese Fashion Designer
who best represents the Portuguese Humanistic Universalism,
because through his work one sees the reconstruction of a part
of the vast world with which the Portuguese contacted.
With
him I learnt better the magic of the East, and I am glad
to acknowledge the important role of bridging two extremes, that
of Europe and of the Far East, that this friend of
mine has accomplished.
Maria de Jesus Barroso Soares
First Lady of Portugal
March 2, 1995 |
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It was indeed
a pleasure to meet Antonio in Macau.
In my long voyage back to New York I had time to
think and ponder over the past two weeks in the Far East.
Above all, it was his designs and perception to color an
style that would equal only the best in the fashion industry,
like Boss, Montana, Armani...
I have been involved with fashion over thirty years in
North America and Europe, in designing, manufacturing
and marketing.
In my opinion, the presentation I have seen of Antonio¹s
designs, both women and men, are fresh, forward, and most could
be very marketable in North America. The style and
his choice of fabrics and colors would most certainly fit into
our market.
Now I feel like Ferneau Mendes Pinto, 400 years ago,
coming back from a long voyage feeling that treasures were
discovered when I think of his talent and approach to style.
James Horvarth
Horvarth & Assoc. Studios Ltd. - New York
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A 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 garments 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.
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Sílvia Chicó
Vice-President of the International Association of Art
Critics
Lisbon, May 30, 1991 |
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Baudelaire was not contented in reproducing, in a work of
art, the scission between exchange value and value of usage. He
proposed to create an absolute merchandise, in which its
transmutation into a fetish would go to the point of abolishing
the reality of the merchandise in itself.
Giorgio Agamden
The Weaving of the Body
The pure and untamed body of a new-born comes ready to be
shaped, branded and oriented into a direction, a meaning and a
desire. Later, the human being, while looking to his own body
and unto other's, will recognize a strange duplicity: a
socialized body that carries the interdiction sign, and then
another one, underground by nature, which in privacy transforms
these signs in objects of desire. At this time a subtle game of
seductions is unfolded, of successive apparitions and
disappearances, created fictions of one's own body.
It is true that the body has to be concealed, but perhaps
the most important issue may not be the birth of interdiction.
At least for us it is more interesting to view the other side of
the issue, the ritualisation and investment of the body , the
metamorphosis of the subjects under the theatrical effect of
garments.
Who can reassure us that its origin was not subtracted to
the utilitarian aspect and was in fact born under the strange
fascination that garments provoke, that the real leit motiv of
its birth was not of aesthetical reasons? To dress as a
ceremonial act, though with different characteristics of those
of the public ceremony, comes very close to ancient rites, but
for only one reason: due to the highly emotional level that
presides to it. This emotion is directly related to the fact
that it is an initiatic act. In the public rite there is as well
an unfolding of a game that aims to dominate the universe
through the repetition and the staging of its forms, its gods
and heroes.
The very essence of femininity is linked to the ornament,
to the construction of the artifice, to the subtle staging of
dresses. From this point of view, the true essence of femininity
does not root in the realm of the natural. It resides exactly in
its extinction. Artifice signals the moment where Nature is
given death through the creation of a sign that hovers above
natural shapes, re-signifying them. There is a deification in
this act, a divinization, an investment in the realm of the
sacred, very close to ritual.
This is an amazing process of a silent erotic
relationship with our own body, a narcysical addition, whether
by the discovery of one's own shapes, exposed or concealed by
the garment, or by the touch of the materials that dress a body,
both in a material and spiritual way, by one's own private
dreams. In this investment of the body, it is mainly its
character of occultation and revelation that encloses a strong
sensual component, this exasperating game destined to the eyes.
The body is transformed into a primordial object, in a space of
affective organization.
Antonio Conceição Junior confers to his creations the
ambivalence that is
natural to his particular condition of an encounter between
East and West. Above all he operates the task
of reconstituting paths between semi-reality and the imaginary
that presided over the historical origin of this encounter.
And from this East, "where everything comes from,
day and faith (...)where god may perhaps exist in reality
and commanding everything..." (in Álvaro de Campos, Maritime
Ode) comes now the ritual character, the staging of the
ceremony, semi-divine figures that cross in space without really
touching the surface.
In today's world, the mythical East is still a
place for dream, since it has not been totally decoded by the
Western matrix.
Thousands of centuries of history and of culture are not
easily annihilated by two hundred years of technological
advances, and everything is yet to be resolved. Therefore, in
Antonio's work we are sent to those ancient sources of
inspiration, to barbarian cities in which men lived together
with gods, where garments radically incorporate its deifying
component.
If, in the case of his masculine clothes, the main
archetype is that of the warrior, fully contained in its lines
and invested of meanings and conventions, in the feminine case
the preference is given to the excessive proliferation, almost
chaotic, of materials. In this chaos, in the shapelessness, the
feminine body emerges divinized, woman-goddess with attributes
of gentleness or cruelty, always through the creation of an
absolute intangibility.
The search for this deification responds in the best of ways to
the impass that today's world has incorporated, to the loss of
values, and to the exhaustion of archetypes. All objects are
intended as fetish, yet only some carry with them the sign of
transcendentability . Only through a clear and radical
assumption of the fetish element it is possible to to recover
them to the imaginary world, freeing them from the fast and
ephemerous parade of merchandise. But here the reference is
paramount. It requires the existence of a link direct or
indirectly linked to a corpus symbolicus, a symbolic body.
Then, invested of meanings, the objective acquires a perenity
that comes from its liberation from time.
In the work of Antonio Conceição Junior it is
space, and not time, that defines the coordinates.
We find a geography,
not a story. We are confronted with difference, not with
evolution. It is the route of an unceasing nomadic journey, that
goes and returns - nomadism - crossing deserts and reaching
fabled cities, meeting goodness and fanatism and the great
masses of people of the East and solitary men drunk of gods.
This is the answer to the exhaustion, to the falseness
of merchandise. Knowingly or unconsciously, Antonio transmutates frivolity into concepts. In the banal and
successive parade of models, Antonio introduces a powerful
fetish element, that deification that has become his trademark.
The bodies are travelers to spaces of an imaginary that is
simultaneously personal and universal.
An ambivalent inhabitant, himself of that East/West,
Antonio sinthetyzes in his work the permanent deambulation,
inattentive to the superfluous and, therefore, it is not
surprising at all in this man, but rather inevitable, the
emergence of essentiality.
Carlos Morais José
Writer, Journalist, Anthropologist |
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