Portraits (Fernando Gerheim)
“Portraits” is not an exhibition of photographs of human faces. It presents 25 pictures of mops, which are used to clean floors. Upside down, with their yarns falling over the handle, they resemble faces: the yarns look like hair on the shoulders, and the vacant structure attached to the handle looks like eyes. The simple game of similarity is edgy. Each of these cleaning tools, all of them from the same species, has a personality, a haircut, etc. There is a visual joke, an irreverent image, like the mustache Duchamp put on the Monalisa’s picture.
These photographs, like other Chaves’ artworks, are like objet trouvé, found objects picked as art, but in this case, because they have been photographed, would be better to call them image trouvé. During an incursion through Dubai’s popular market, a sort of genuine SAARA, in the richest city of the Emirates, Marcos Chaves observed the mops that are left leaning on the walls, next to the stores, upside down, drying after being used to clean the sidewalks. The Arabs call them, in English, “brooms”. In Brazil, “vassouras”. In Portugal, “esfregona”, a feminine word, very adequate to the object in the context of this exhibition. The mops together become a “parade” of masks, but not like the African ones, primitive, nor Arabians, with veils. Their image does not intent to illustrate an exotic reality. In a multicultural world, these portraits deconstruct with humor a very stereotyped vision of another culture. These are not posed portraits, but instant snapshots. Instead of ethnology of the Arabian world, the images reveal a thousand faces of the ordinary object.
The exhibition also presents three marquetry photo-frames with Arabian motif and images of the sun, constituting a typical desert landscape. The work unmasks representation, both in art and culture, with a calculated laugh very characteristic of Marcos Chaves’ artworks.
November 2009.
Fernando Gerheim