Jorge Molder: Pinocchio

Chiado 8 Arte Contemporânea (Lisbon)
Pinocchio

Situated in an heterogeneous locality, in Lisbon city centre, Chiado 8 Arte Contemporânea would have the means to established a dialogue with its surrounding instead of just traditionally exhibit objects. Thought, it is less a critical survey of a highly influential aesthetic than a feel-good baggy reunion, focused on one’s identity. This last thing is what we find when we see Jorge Molder’s new body of work entitled Pinocchio.

Artworks are a reflection of their time. Monarch, aristocrats and wealthy individuals before the 20th century have usually been happy to have themselves and those from their file immortalized in oil painting and sculptures. Rarely commissioning artworks set out to represent society as a whole. Even in our times, portraits, in particular, unveil and reveal the tastes of the commissioning classes. On a different level, already in Ancient Egypt kings used the mummification’s process to preserve the body for afterlife, as a means to aid the essence as it transitions to a new destination.

Nonetheless, today almost everything comes out of photography, the medium has had popularized itself as form and as capturing moments in time and theories: copying, cutting and pasting out almost anything that is in existence, the reproducibility of what is possible – Cindy Sherman’s dressed like a model is turning in to the dressed model as they really are; John Coplans’ nude body is about how we bare an aged body.

Thus, this new work by the Portuguese photographer keeps with the same philosophical and systematic exploration brought by him in the last three decades. Photographic pictures of the self assembled as portraits with dark cloaks evolving him. In Pinocchio, while encapsulating the body in strips of white linen, by change, the search transfers the negative into positive. In the burial ceremony the black mourning becomes a white journey.

Getting into the public realm, both context and content are deceitful pictures, double-dealing like Pinocchio’s dream of becoming a real boy. Meaning, the reconstruction of a place multiple singularities whereas focus to the outside (being inclusive), rather than to the self (being exclusive).

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXVIII, Núm. 255. (92), Verano 2009 España © Jorge Molder, de la serie "Pinocchio", 2006-2009, fotografia, 96x96cm.