Untitled (It’s About That Time crystal version)
A solo exhibition of João Onofre, featuring a work produced at Atlantis/Vista Alegre that materializes in crystal the solos I and II of Miles Davis’s 1969 theme It’s About That Time.
Exhibited in a specific installation that transforms the ground floor of the Rialto6 into a new exhibition space, Onofre’s artwork summons a sequence of intermedial processes of translation/transference of sounds, materials, codes, time (the space of the event) and space (the place it occupies in time), materializing in an abstract form a concrete duration or, in other words, in the form of the spatial duration of key moments of the original track.
A recurring practice in the work of João Onofre, the hybridized performance is here manifested in the crystalline version of a container – also a key concept in the artist’s work – or of a container within a container and the closure that both entail. But whereas this closure would seemingly foster the presential stability of what it harbors, the installation actually undermines presence itself since it reflects the insoluble deferral of synchrony between what we see and what we hear, and the excess to which both are exposed and whose visual and sound constraints return us only an absence.
Vasco Stocker de Vilhena