Portugal

João Louro will represent Portugal at the 56th Venice Biennale with I’ll Be Your Mirror – poems and problems, a site-specific installation, curated by María de Corral.

João Louro has carried out a site-specific intervention appropriating the spaces of the Palazzo Loredan Library and showing compositions from series like Dead Ends and Blind Images, as well as painting and both visual and sound installations. In both the series Louro uses language in different manners and with different possibilities. The spectator’s role is fundamental, given that for Louro the value of the work of art is what emerges from the link created between the work and the spectator.

The works Dead Ends are related to the challenge of language. In these he uses road signs as symbols that are automatically recognisable; only afterwards does the spectator reach the second level of reading, which are the contents. The Dead Ends stand as objects at the same time as being concepts due to their strong physical component.
In Blind Images the spectator is faced with a canvas on which the image has been blanked out, hidden beneath a coating of glossy acrylic and a glass panel that produces the effect of a mirror. At the bottom of the canvas there is a text alluding to or descriptive of the cancelled image, thus provoking different approaches to what is visible or varying perspectives through which one can consider the image.

João Louro (b. 1963, Lisbon) lives and works in Lisbon. 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. A natural descendant of conceptual and minimal art, João Louro has sought to override the romantic paradigm using the importance and role of the viewer, who completes the work of art. One of his work’s main concerns is the reorganization of the visual world and what visuality means. Another important issue is the language in all of its possibilities and aspects. He is motivated by artistic and cultural convictions, by aesthetic and sociological decisions, but fundamentally by his deep knowledge of literature, poetry, music and cinema.