João Penalva

On Friday, October 31, 2008, Galerie Thomas Schulte opens their first solo show of works by Portuguese artist João Penalva. The artist will be present at the opening, 6 to 9 pm.

João Penalva calls himself a “storyteller”. He is fascinated by the powers of the imagination to assert itself against reality and to cross the limits of the image and language. Accordingly, in his video works, photographs, objects, and installations, he combines language and image in a way that evokes in us other images that are often just as strong and present as those actually shown by the artist.

Penalva’s training lies in painting and followed a conscious break with the theatre and the stage where he had worked for years as a professional dancer. At the same time, his exclusive interest in painting expressed then a rejection of installation art that seemed to him too close to some forms of theatricality. Yet, some 20 years later, he felt that painting alone could not convey the complexitiy of his multi-layered narratives and, in a return to the theatrical formats that he had estranged himself from, opened to film, video, text, and installation. He developed his now typical way of working, deconstructing narrative structures in the collage of image, text, and language.

The exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin shows the video-installation Light beam (2007), photographic-based works from the series Khosoko-doro (2006-2008), as well as the slide and video projection Pavlina, from 2007. Presented as “an entertainment” Pavlina takes us to the results of scientific research on how one’s professional life creeps back into one’s dreams after one has retired. But again Penalva seduces his audience into the visualization of images of other places, other people, and other times alongside those being projected, forcing us to question the appearance of reality as a fiction.