Portuguese-born London-based Joao Penalva’s large-scale retrospective is a selection of works reflecting on a great number of his artistic considerations together with the approaches and strategies he applies.
One of the basic pursuits of Penalva’s works is the scrutiny of representation itself. In this process visual elements will play an equal part with verbal ones, illustrating in fact the inseparable quality, the symbiotic relationship of the two. The visual „evidences” would get lost without the written or pronounced texts in the flow of information and vice versa; the interpretation of the texts would end up in but a vague attempt without the accompanying images. Side by side they will hopefully direct our attention to their mutual dependency. In Kitsune, a film by Penalva, we see a rocky-wooded landscape where, apart from the slow motion of fog we can follow the Japanese dialogue of the two unvisible male protagonists subtitled in other languages. During watching the film, viewers might have various associations of the relationship between the images and the text heard, till they are informed in the credits that the film was shot on a Spanish island. Our stereotyped associations of ideas will thus question themselves post festam.
