The gaze as a gesture,
as a body

In this Joana Villaverde exhibition titled Looking at animals, the relationship with the Other is built over a lineage of relationships that invariably confronts us with the body, and with a specific context where that body expands itself or, on the contrary, contracts itself and finds its meaning again in other morphologies that apparently escape the human figure, but of which a meaning of life is rescued, guiding us to rethink ourselves while beings in relations, that see and recognize each other, whether it be animals, in the most literal sense, or humans, in an ethical, moral and political sense which defines us.

The exhibited works were conceived through many media, like oil painting, drawing, or video, strongly marked by a bold drawing, at times close to an expressionist practice, depicting various animals. In this way, we return to an otherness with others, with our gaze and with the spaces and places they inhabit and live in, in the every day of an artist. Even when she settles in a specific place, like the studio, she is a part of the life that keeps going every day before that landscape where she lives, and those atmospheric and lighting changes that permeate through the wide windows and build a time of their own, experimenting and working on different scales and formats. Besides, it is important to notice that her literary and cinematic interest represent intersecting heterotopies in a cumulative and often contradictory process, in the sense that the artist produces a deconstruction of those imagined spaces by fragmenting and dissecting each fictional moment and place. In this context, the work Why Look at Animals?¹ by the philosopher and writer John Berger is particularly important for the reflection required by the work carried out for the exhibition. The artist places us before a sentence, or a proposition, which invites us to stop our gaze at the animals. In principle, it will be about the animals that are a part of the exhibition, even from a perspective that reminds us of fairy tales which are also a questioning of human action, like the play The Bremen Town Musicians, a composition fragmented on the two axes of the sheet that references a German traditional tale by the Grimm Brothers. On the other hand, two works titled Vaca I and Vaca II, perhaps animals that inhabit the landscape where the artist lives, are represented as if images from a cinematographic memory, on that depth of the field, like a kind of trompe l’oeil which falls silent to the temptation of the mere portrait of those animals. Another work is titled HÍBRIDO confronts us with a close-up of the head of an animal we can barely recognize in the proximity or similarity with others. It can be a dog, or a horse, or a mythical being, for example, but it can also just be a head on a dark and earthy background, that looks and opens its jaw as if to scream at us, maybe even a calling we will never hear.

The written language in the titles, less immediately comprehensible at times, is particularly relevant in the case of OXI, two large paintings where the representation of a canid or of a small drawing with one line that seems to enunciate a profile, perhaps abstract, can be identified — and we are faced with a trick. What is it, or why, Oxi? Oxi is a Greek adverb of negation. One of the works, OXI II, presents a close-up of the gaze of an animal, whereas OXI I confronts us with a body position that could resemble a defensive movement. The title of these two works reveals that heterotopic geography in which the vernacular and daily aspect of the artist’s life coexists with a social awareness of her time. Therefore, Oxi is both an adverb of negation and a word placed in a paradoxical zone, between affection, chance, and the necessity of dislocating the meaning of an event. On one hand, it is closely connected to the name of the animal depicted, the dog of the artist, and on the other, it marks a defining moment in European politics, as it was the most-heard slogan on the day of the 2015 Greek referendum which rejected European economic policies for Greece. Joana Villaverde does not act under the celebratory reasoning of the event. Instead, she gathers and fuses different events marked by collective memory, and simultaneously by her intimacy, home, and all who are closest to her. Similarly, in the short video pieces, a self-referential circularity of the spoken word resists, and in the movement of her drawing, a process of hiding and revealing, which, opposite to the large pieces, seems to be extinguished in a fragment of time, but return, building themselves up as solidified memories.

João Silvério

¹ John Berger, Why Look at Animals?, London: Penguin Books, 2009.