“Any artist, valuable in his own time, is self-combusting.”

João Louro takes a word and moulds it. Or films it. Or sculpts it. Or turns it into a different kind of restlessness. He appropriates written language to provide it with a new plastic, artistic meaning. Everything began with a question, or rather a suspicion of what the words were telling him. Born in Lisbon, in 1963, he dreamed of freedom, wanting to make it his way of life. He studied architecture at the University of Lisbon and forged a path that saw him establish himself as one of Portugal’s most original and influential artists. His inspiration stems from conceptual or minimalist art, while his themes cover various branches of interest. Time, maps, poems, the thinking of authors such as Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin. This is where he operates and creates new forms of communication. Or, as he says in this conversation, he tinkers with magic.

Looking back over your career, can you identify any thematic continuity or disruptions or micro-disruptions in your work? Whether procedure, language, or the use of materials...?

Very early on, I realised that there were two fundamental things. The first was not belonging to “Pavlov’s pack”, and the second was being free. Also being as free as possible, even before I knew what it meant to be an artist. I only realised later that the closest to freedom involved being an artist, a pursuit that was also the most expressive. To this end, the most important thing was taking that freedom I had sensed and develop my work. I had invented my free life. At an early stage, my work seemed disperse, however, I was very committed to the “interior”. Thus, my work should be viewed in a more holistic way, where themes that I’ve always pursued are identified, and less in a visual and separate way. There’s a kind of ongoing process, which entails wonder and inquiry.

Could you explore the idea of freedom, or being free, in relation to being an artist? What’s the connection?

When I was a child, I used to watch planes in the air, the cerulean blue of the sky up high above me, with the white lines. I thought I would be on that aeroplane one day. I remember it being the expression of the greatest freedom. And then, one day, I was on that plane. I had already discovered how to be free, how to escape constraints, but I still had to create an activity that would also be an expression of that freedom. Perhaps influenced by my vocation, I had the intuition that art could address any subject in a more or less conscious way, with questions or intuitions but without the need for proof. I also realised that it had great potential. We also have to add a “dysfunctionality” in technological society, where functionality dominates and the client always comes first: I have a toothache, I want a house, etc. This is unlike art, which reveals itself and if there’s a customer, they come afterwards. All these situations create a freedom bubble with a dimension hard to corrupt, with art being the generator of this atmosphere.

There seems to be a cartography to this path. For you, what are the key points by which your artistic or creative map can be traced?

I can say that these key points began with disappointments, or wariness... Everything I had read and seen came in for criticism that made me suspicious of language and image. I stopped believing what I saw, read, or heard. Obviously, many writers helped me with this suspicion. They were the ones I considered “family”. From there, I embarked on a corpus of work that is never ending and which always seems to have something to add or subtract; a kind of template from which I produce thought and work. The artist only continues because he can’t complete the full arc of the solution, through trial and error, between wonder and mirage. There’s this degree of incompleteness that encourages him to continue. He becomes a hunter, an explorer and a scribe, in a wild place, in a world that is often not what he thinks it is. This explains why artists often possess this unquenchable obsession, a fuel that burns constantly. Any artist, valuable in his own time is self-combusting.

You mentioned language and a relationship of initial suspicion towards it. However, this relationship has changed a lot in your work.

I have a love/hate relationship with language. On one hand, I believe that language lies. It has been worn down by use and abuse over time, where meaning and signifier no longer coincide. That said, it’s human beings’ most complex invention. How a word is transformed into an image in the communication process... That’s magic! Or how it becomes thought when articulated in its infinite combinations and explores the unknown, the misunderstood, it also reveals passions and secrets, or how it turns into poetry.... next to opposing thumbs, which is the great genetic invention. Language is the most powerful human invention. Without language we are not human.

Can you do the same exercise in relation to image?

This is another issue. Image means representation since the very beginning. However, very recently, at the beginning of the 19th century, photography emerged and radically changed the way we dealt with images. And there were authors at the time who reflected upon it, or through it: from reproduction to memory, from Benjamin to Warburg, we realised that a new world of representation had taken hold. Photography’s technical mediation democratizes representation, resulting in an increase of images made by copy. This enlargement and multiplication of the image has become a contemporary pathology. Nowadays, we’re all photographers. This constant and continuous flow means that we have lost the ability to read images. There are photographers, but no viewers. There’s a tendency for the world to become a huge jigsaw image, a superficial skin that incorporates an increasing number of images, without an “inside”, without a viewer, in a luminous landscape, without depth, in an era of darkness of light. Luxury in the future will be defined by silence and the absence of images.

When I started working on Blind Images [1990] I wanted to review the visual universe and think about all this. Only by taking a step back and erasing or hiding images, which made the text they were associated with reverberate, did I realise that this emptiness calmed the vortex. It was also a way of employing the viewer’s memory by bringing their collection of images to conclude the work. And by creating this vehicle, I was able to use them in the work. On the other hand, it was also a way of keeping the work open... and achieving both purposes this way. This was something that interested me. I’m still working on it, and I don’t consider it finished.

This presupposes a different concept of viewer than the traditional one.

That’s obvious for me! It’s difficult to achieve though. So that this viewer, who is no longer just a viewer, can emerge we need to overcome the romantic paradigm, which is where we’re still set and where we produce our judgements. It’s the ground we tread and the map of our directions. And if the current paradigm establishes this map, with its own particular features, such as the issue of the author, his signature, his style, his particular vision... this authorial hallmark will remain and the leap will yet to be made. Creating a fissure to reach a clearing is a goal I pursue and a task that, in my opinion, transforms my work and gives it specific characteristics. As I envisage it, this fissure is only possible when the artist gives the work a new character, leaving it unfinished and preparing it for an addition of “content”. This interference is also part of the work. By leaving the work open when exhibited, no longer does the viewer just enjoy, they also act. This is something the artist accepts and seeks, thus creating a contrary movement, diminishing the importance of the artist in favour of the importance of the “viewer/doer”. The artist’s “hand” no longer bears his signature and vision but leads to the incomplete work. It leads to a clearing.

In this new fruition dynamic, how does the memory of the viewer encounter that of the artist or of the work of art?

I start with the belief that memory cannot be erased, it exists in every one of us, and it grows by the day. Everything is recorded as if we were a black box. However, accessing this memory doesn’t depend on a conscious will. There’s a useful, available memory. And there there’s a stored memory that can emerge with no bidding, via such things as epiphanies, dreams, sudden memories triggered by some reason, or survival processes. Since the beginning of the 20th century, a new path is made in the guise of psychology. Memory is created from the senses we possess as a species and also arises from these senses. They’re recordings convened and then they are tools that we develop to analyse our surroundings, to survive in the world and to “see” it. All these senses are empowered and aided by a conceptual tool that is language.

*Little Boy*
*2018, steel, enamel and acrylic paint*
*450 cm height × 74 cm diameter*
PHOTO **BRUNO LANÇA**

When Wittgenstein said that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”, this thought expressed something more... Without this constantly evolving tool, the reach is the reach of language, and that reach without memory is trapped and has no expression. Memory remains mute in a narrow, short world. Language constantly convenes memory, for example, when observing a work of art. If this relationship is not established, reception is weakened. We also know that the brain feels more comfortable and prefers to recognise what it has met before than getting to know something for the first time. It abhors voids and always finds ways to fill them, but if language doesn’t establish itself in this communication, all these mechanisms become numb.

Knowing this, I use ways of keeping the work open, unfinished, available to the viewer, creating an understanding of the work in this provoked attraction and, when possible, appreciation. This is just the point of contact, the gateway. And any image from the work that can be summoned by the viewer in this process will always be more important than the image that I might eventually present. This is why I’ve been deleting images throughout my life. My images don’t matter. What my work endeavours to do is create the conditions and open up this pathway to the viewer’s memory. This is how memories find one another and can be shared. This is the only way the viewer can enter the work and complete it. In these circumstances, they are no longer just viewers.

Let’s look at the physicality of the word. The word as matter. A concrete, physical thing that gains meaning in the space it occupies. It is form and meaning. How did you arrive at this approach?

The word is physical, nuclear, atomic. However, I also know that within this physicality there’s a core of power. Nobody has ever seen this core yet, but we know that its power is immense and it doesn’t belong to the physical universe. It’s found in poetry, in shamanism, in the primitive word, in sacred books and in witchcraft. Based on this understanding, I started experimenting with words, trying to look inside letters and sentences... I separated them, broke them, provoked reactions... Words hide behind other words. When I made L’Avenir dure Longtemps (2003) from Althusser’s book and undid the logic of the title, I found a mutilated (Lawrence) Durrell within the phrase (L’Avenir) (Durel) (Longtemps). Or when I did História do Crime (1995-2018), which was an altered dictionary with 100,000 words, there was a complete revision of the dictionary, where all the meanings were updated based on a logic created for this project, which produced a wellspring of information. Or when I produced Et Dieu Créa la Femme (2010), where I found that just by changing the sequence of the words in the sentence, a whole world came crashing in: Et Dieu Créa le Femme; Créa la Femme et Dieu; Et la Femme Creá Dieu. These are some examples of my investigations with words; a search for answers, some providing surprise and wonder. Maybe the last important work in this series of studies was Little Boy (2010), a replica of the atomic bomb with various inscriptions on its fuselage, which deals with that immeasurable atomic power that exists within the word.

What was the genesis of Little Boy? How did it start and develop?

Little Boy (2010) perhaps reaches the peak of this idea I had about the power of the word. Establishing this link between atom and letter was a key step. Both are tiny units of huge power and making that connection made sense to me. I decided it was a good idea to follow the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer, who appeared as a “physicist-linguist” of atomic power and fission. Then it was my turn to bring it to word level, taking it into my environment, using principles and discoveries. My project used all the visual and conceptual apparatus, without ever dealing with the catastrophic part. It only focussed on revealing the power contained within the atom and finalising my thoughts on the “atom-letter”.

How do you choose the material for each work?

Another thing that belongs to the academies, to the paradigm we talked about before, has to do with establishing boundaries and defining them with “workshop knowledge”. The artist was a “painter” or a “sculptor” and then, very recently, the “photographer” appeared and changed and expanded the limits of art. The divisions established by the academia for fine arts no longer define contemporary artistic activity. And artists, if they have such a vocation, will use different media to produce their work. In my case, without wanting to disregard the technical aspect, which interests me and which I study, I use all the possibilities available to me. I see myself as a conductor who has a group of musicians at his disposal to conduct a score. The score is the idea and if the work I want to create needs to be three-dimensional, I choose sculpture; if it’s a two-dimensional plane, I choose painting or photography. Deciding which “media” to use ultimately has to do with the idea-score that is at the root of the work I want to produce.

You’re an artist-reader, as well as a writer, in the sense that you use words in your work like someone who writes. You do this to create meaning, even if they’re the sentences or words of others. How do you see yourself in this double - or triple - role?

The word is the greatest human invention. Next comes Gutenberg’s printing press and the possibility of spreading the word. What interests me is the word. One day in winter, while walking on the beach, I was talking to Lawrence Weiner and trying to make out if his work was, at any time, related to poetry. He stopped, looked at me, picked up a piece of wood from the sand and said: “My work is about objects, not feelings or poetry”. And that was the day I realised that a word is a brick. And that brick can relate to other bricks, and even to humans. Lawrence used words, but he was a sculptor. And knowing that a word is a brick was very important to me. But I wanted more. I wanted to know the inside of that brick and share what I saw. That’s my work.

And how do you react to the expression artist-philosopher that is sometimes used to define you?

More than climbing the mountain of philosophy and finding the “rock of Surlej” or travelling “Off the Beaten Track”, what interests me is knowing that there are still traces of origin contained in poetry, a reservoir that’s still protected and allows it to invent language without being affected by technical rationality. It’s there that we can still find the ancestral moment, which was then taken over by technique, creating the first parallax error. It was at a distant time that philosophy diverged and reached us without being able to respond. That’s why I don’t climb the mountain of philosophy, but rather enter the cave of metaphysics to look for this ancient parallax error. My work has this vocation… the one of a clock that is set for another hour.

What do you like or look for as a viewer of art?

Resonance! Tuning strings in music. It’s what we feel when we hear the tuning of an instrument. The notes vibrate and intersect in sync with the listener’s frequency. We move through the work, without imposition, and we are carried along. It’s a place without weight, a feeling of fulfilment that gives you goosebumps. Everything can be there and it’s not just pleasure. It can be dramatic and terrible... we receive a reward or a lesson. In this “Go”, we also put things of our own, it’s not mere surrender... If I don’t exist, then that art piece doesn’t exist.

João Louro - The appropriation of language

“Any artist, valuable in his own time, is self-combusting.”

Benjamin Weil - On the new CAM

Subsistences Of The Flâneur