SOMMER PAVILION | LITTLE BOY
An adaptation of the project “Gravity in Suspension”, by Clanet & Brito, which won the Sommer Pavilion International Ideas Competition promoted by Cascais City Council. The pavilion has been adapted to house one of João Louro's most striking works: an exact reproduction of Little Boy, the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, which was made in 2018 as part of the Linguistic Ground Zero project at MAAT /Projeto Room.
The conceptual artist, who already has the sculptural piece Hapiness Molecule next to the not-too-distant Golf Academy, has in Little Boy an anti-bellicist manifesto and an invitation to reflect on destruction, the destructive vehicle itself, and the symbolic relationship established with culture and its icons. The surface of the sculpture is covered in inscriptions, graffiti and poetic references, creating a disturbing contrast between the destructive power of the bomb and artistic expression, thus suggesting the potential of art to perpetuate and transcend violence, thus becoming a positive message of hope.
João Louro was born in 1963, in Lisbon, where he lives and works. He studied architecture at the University of Lisbon and painting at the Ar.Co School of Visual Art. João Louro’s body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography and video.
João Louro’s work descends from minimal and conceptual art, with special attention to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. It draws out a topography of time, with references that are personal but mainly they are generational. With regular recourse to language as a source, as well as the written word, he seeks a review of the image in contemporary culture, starting out from a set of representations and symbols from the collective visual universe. Minimalism, conceptualism, Pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism, authors such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georges Bataille and Blanchot as well as artists like Donald Judd and the ever-present Duchamp, form the reference lexical universe of the artist.
He was the Portuguese representative at the Venice Biennale of 2015, with the exhibition I Will Be Your Mirror | Poems and Problems