Nuno Vasa- Home

Press Release

“The fact that someone’s “enjoyment is alleviated” won’t be an empty paradox or, at best, a lovely euphemism expressing the fact of being simply robbed of it?”   
SlavojZizek


To think about Nuno Vasa’s work is an invitation to look at the creative act’s beginning phase. His pieces reveal what João Lima Pinharanda defines as a “dominant direction”, expressed both in the enviable coherence that his work demonstrates, as well as the speech that the artist looks to transmit. Sculpture, painting, installation, performance and, in this case, the digital installation, are the means used for an expression oriented to the grammar of space and time, to the coordinates of possibility and impossibility – the necessary and inevitable reflexion around human condition of our strange modernity.

In his work we see that, beyond a systemic approach to the physical/virtual space of representation/installation, Vasa looks to create an interactive dynamic between his work and the spectator, being the latter, usually, invited to participate in the affirmation of the sense of the piece dialogue, up dating it and assuming himself as the necessary extension to the effectiveness of its meaning. This appeal for contact is easily observed in works as Jantar Possível II (2003, Colecção Vilnius Capital Europeia da Cultura 2009), Casa de Contar Segredos (2004), Cinema (2004) or Kiss me with red lips and I’ll never be the same (2006).


The question of representation/inscription space becomes also ananalysis vector essential to coming closer to the work of Nuno Vasa. In installations/performances like Auto Retracto (2005), Acto (2006/2007) or O Gozo (2007), the artist proposes the work of demolishing the creative/expressive gesture, imposing the center of his problematic around questions as essential as the matter and its relation with space.

O Gozo (now available in digital version and accessible on the Web), the work that serves as motif for these words, reflects the tense relation we establish with our own imagination. His group of twenty four images (a funny reference to the illusionist mechanics of Cinema) there is a common denominator: the painful impossibility of accessing a direct speech in automatic form.   

The images of O Gozo will speak for themselves and will provoke, certainly, the most diverse emotions in the spectator. Meanwhile, and taking the risk of affecting the enjoyment of each observer, here’s a quote from Nuno Vasa himself:

“Some of these images are extremely shocking and capable of hurting your sensibility”

Mário Verino Rosado,
Santa Cruz, 2011