Ana Vidigal – A Importância da Teimosia

Ana Vidigal
The Importance of Stubbornness
14th May – 2nd July 2022

Galeria Fernando Santos presents the next 14th of May “The Importance of Stubbornness” by Ana Vidigal, in what will be the artist’s second exhibition at the Gallery but the first one presenting work on canvas.
“Ana Vidigal has been exhibiting since the early 1980s”, can be read in the text by Eduardo Paz Barroso conceived for this exhibition.
An interesting coincidence seems to be the fact that the same Eduardo Paz Barroso was the author of the text published in Jornal de Notícias on the occasion of Ana Vidigal’s first solo exhibition in Porto, more than forty years ago…

IRONIES OF THE OTHER’S SPEECH
by Eduardo Paz Barroso

Ana Vidigal has been exhibiting since the early 1980s. Since then, she has marked out a field of singularities, either through her plastic discourse, or through her attitude towards the materials and resources, or through the coherence that serenely inhabits her creative process.When she started working and exhibiting, it was evident, for some (including myself) a sense of anticipation anchored in a feminine imagination fertile in convictions. To say that Ana Vidigal is a feminist at a time when this theme and problematic seemed, so to speak, protected by the irradiation of an ideological matrix that (almost) was exhausted in the existentialist discussion about the second sex (Beauvoir), it was for this reason a true but reductive statement. There is a constant, multifaceted and genuine audacity in this work, which quickly leads us to the questions of the place and status of women in society and in sexuality. And so to psychoanalysis, to the attempt to overcome the repressed, to a refusal of sublimation. In an attempt to condense the question concerning women, and the domain of the unconscious, in Ana Vidigal’s work, paraphrasing Lacan’s famous phrase, the artist’s interlocutor does not discover the discourse of the (*male) Other, but the discourse of the (*female) Other.

Parody, as a refusal of pre-existing models, and as a rehearsal of a more or less devastating ironic effect, is the protagonist of the end of modernity. It is also in this sense that Ana Vidigal presents herself, in the already distant beginning of the 80s of the 20th century, with a spirit and a practice of anticipation. Literally, in the plastic field she creates, and with the strength of the magnetisms she establishes, attracting opposites and unpredictability, the artist entertains and amuses us, but also because of this she disturbs us, with her way of producing the comic. It does not intelectualize it with baroque pretensions, nor does it vulgarize it with false popular ingenuity. She chooses to transport it to an experimental field where, with mastery, she deals with techniques such as collage and painting, with signs of a world that, more than contested, or ridiculed, needed to be deconstructed. Which always implies a game with the object and a predisposition for combinations and unpredictability, in short, for a dive into language, accepting what is most seductive and cruel. Seductive and cruel continue to be the works of Ana Vidigal, as we can see them in this exhibition at Galeria Fernando Santos. We’ll be back there.

Ana Vidigal contributed to founding a practice in which the deforming character associated with parody, the act of transforming, acquires a plastic consistency capable of betraying meaning. Linda Hutcheon in her theory of parody (1991), by questioning the world of forms in 20th century art, establishes a new critical field that enriches the perception of postmodernity. It is with this type of experience that the artist gets involved from an early age, fragmenting records and references of a female universe imprisoned in an exhausted semantics. Moving the literary instance to a visual universe where the summoned objects move away from their origin consists, in this case, and as in the present exhibition, in a feminine appropriation of codes and materials, which, thanks to this feminine becoming, give rise to new possibilities of understanding and enjoyment.

In 2010, an anthological exhibition presented at the CAM of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisboa allowed us to put these and other questions into perspective. A journey through the artist’s trajectory led to the re-encounter with her starting point, to a geography with places that were once under siege, but which, thanks to aesthetic action, became available to the imagination. And so they were freed. This anthology made it possible to identify some essential issues, such as memory and inheritance. They reappear in later stages, either through the constant connection to the playful aspects characteristic of childhood, or through the appreciation of narrative fragments that come from autobiography and personal history.

Here, too, we continue, in a way, on the feminine side of the gaze. A side where we can find traces of a world and a certain type of intimacy with resonances of a gallery of characters like those that populate the novels of Agustina Bessa-Luís, haughty, disconcerting, determined creatures, but also vulnerable to frustration, dependent on whims, discreetly terrified by the suspicions that love always brings with it…
Ana Vidigal thus persists in a plot that continues to weave, without ignoring the political responsibility, so to speak, of making choices, of materializing them in an artistic practice that knows how to claim time in the double inscription of the historical and the affective. This is like the pregnancy of the event and the unknown. In a game of paradoxes, which probably depends on a feminine wisdom, it is common, in front of these works, to feel foreign to what is familiar, and close to what is unknown.

Thus, some premises are constituted that allow us to interpret what remains and what is added in this exhibition. Very schematically, and to use a formulation that synthesizes the weight and density of the real in existence, what resists remains, the responsibility of material life (Marguerite Duras), filtered by the rewriting and the palimpsest, two of the obsessions to which it probably leads us back. The work of Ana Vidigal, and here, today, once again. The lived experience is added as a metamorphosis, a reframing of what the artist considers essential. And if the essential thing is to live your life (Godard, 1962), not only because of the risk and loss involved (in Godard’s film, Anna Karina, the actress, sees, as a character, her dreams vanish and ends up a woman of life), but above all because of the need for critical retreat.

The reframing that we are dealing with here makes recent episodes suddenly become particularly old.
Or that the lives of others merge gloriously with the life of the artist. And, again and again, discreet and exciting, the fidelity to a nuclear, ontological, and perhaps unfinished space, which we stubbornly call Home, is insinuated. Something secret then turns the attic into a stage where lies are disguised as pretense. And there is nothing scandalous about it.