watercourse

exhibition in collaboration with Antonio Poppe,
Galeria 111, Lisbon, 2017.

(more info)
(press)

“(...) From the onset, [‘watercourse’] is an aesthetic convergence but also a personal one between the work of two artists, from work of their own and from work created together. In the beginning we find “Inunda, Utra” (Flood, Utra), a long and older poem of Poppe shown in its original sheets (around 700) with all of its floods and tears, but that still let us see an extended part of the verses. Along this course, the sheets become massively covered by the image of a fish that appears in a J. M. G. Le Clézio book until the composition is itself a shoal of words in latent state.

The word will cross the whole exhibition, although sometimes it passes to Joana’s hands and dresses itself in the shape of a samurai’s kimono made of carbon paper, or goes on into a Poppe’s book-collage (...). In many works, paraphrase and intertextuality generate a palimpsest effect that aids not only to integrate the two participations as well as to make associations between it’s different contents. What is intended is not so much to turn the observer into a hunter of references, but to lead them where they cross, be them of visual nature, make reference to literary texts or to the many spiritual traditions that are summoned (primitive christianity, persian, indian and japanese traditions). Poppe and Fervença rescue these system’s iconography, sometimes in its ornamental dimension, sometimes in allusion to an event or textual fragment (...).

Joana shows abstract drawings or cosmic visions in unlikely materials (carbon paper, magnetic stripe, carbon lead, etc.) full of symbology, or hyper-realistic graphite drawings, phantasmagoric enough to deviate us from the easiness with which she makes them, be it when she closes in on a childhood imaginary or when she gives us ones that are like small ‘cabinets de curiosités’. These can assimilate the communion with nature in the photographs of the american Sally Mann and then concentrate themselves on questioning 'Ha Bun Shu’ — a japanese book on wave drawing —, while the photographs and the collages can bring up Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema or even a child’s ecography.

All of these references escape a historical organization or a systemic linearity. They come together as if the ‘Warburgian’ method of image association could have a personal instrumentalization able to organize a collective imaginary but without the archival rhetoric usually associated with this purpose. In fact, we wonder if the ‘matter’ of this exhibition will not be very different from the ones that Poppe and Fervença will show next because in them it will also be about delivering the movement of everything (...).”

(full text here)

'frontal/ front view', 2017. Carbon lead on paper with magnetic strip. 33 x 21 cm

'tardoz/ back view', 2017. Carbon lead on paper with magnetic strip. 33 x 21 cm

'with Ha Bun Shu', 2017. Carbon lead on paper with magnetic strip. 33 x 21 cm

'le dessin de formes a', 2017. Carbon lead on paper with magnetic strip. 33 x 21 cm

'le dessin de formes b', 2017. Carbon lead on paper with magnetic strip. 33 x 21 cm

(from left to right)

frontal/ front view, 2017
carbon lead on paper with magnetic stripe
33 x 21 cm

tardoz/ back view, 2017
carbon lead on paper with magnetic stripe
33 x 21 cm

with Ha Bun Shu, 2017
carbon lead on paper with magnetic stripe
33 x 21 cm

le dessin de formes a, 2017
carbon lead on paper with magnetic stripe
33 x 21 cm

le dessin de formes b, 2017
carbon lead on paper with magnetic stripe
33 x 21 cm

“I’m here.’ And Echo/ Caught at the syllables as if they were precious:/ ‘I’m here,’ she cried, ‘I’m here’ and ‘I’m here’ and ‘I’m here.’" Carbon paper sheets. 2,00 x 1,30 cm

“I’m here.’ And Echo/ Caught at the syllables as if they were precious:/ ‘I’m here,’ she cried, ‘I’m here’ and ‘I’m here’ and ‘I’m here." Carbon paper sheets. 2,00 x 1,30 cm

ao lado do espaço/ beside the space, 2017
collage and graphite on paper with magnetic stripe
21 x 33 cm

still stripe, 2016
collage and graphite on Phillips paper with magnetic stripe
33 x 23 cm

'untitled', 2016. Graphite and collage on paper with magnetic strip. 21 x 33 cm

untitled, 2016
graphite and collage on paper with magnetic stripe
21 x 33 cm