Saladas Tipográficas e Outras Barbaridades Afins
Pedro Proença
PT
Guerrilla Art

Biblioteca Municipal de Arraiolos
Between June 3rd and 27th

Arraiolos, Évora, Redondo, Sines, Viana do Alentejo, at a street near you
July 1st to September 30th

Printings: Staples and Recicloteca

A graphic joke, a game of writing, a construction made of letters, styles, and images assembled in funny combinations. This is the result of Pedro Proença’s work.

The history of printing and illustration, as well as artistic avant-gardes of the beginning of the 20th century, provide him with a variety of references that he re:combines with the taste for funny jokes and ingenious success. Pedro Proença is a designer that recuperates the Greek graphic design, the shiny colours of Pop aesthetics, the promotional illustrations from the 50s, and low-quality exotic printings, at the same he takes up graphic styles, from the birth of Gutenberg’s movable type printing, through baroque elegant letters, to the unforgettable experience of the Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism, to remix them in a new combination.

Pedro Proença re:assembles, re:paints, re:uses, cuts-and-sticks, copy-pastes the graphics, writing, and illustration. Playing with types, playing with words and the place they fill in the page is a joyfull process that allows him to take advantage of what is already existing and thus to build something new. Crossed headlines, clipped titles and sources, fonts and drawing, image and word, word-image, writing as image, everything turns out as a serious printing work with an amusing tone. An ironic attack to the world of linguistic sense, to the image in a poster format. The single parts are no news, but the outcome is totally unexpected.

Pedro Proença, was born in Lubango (Angola) in 1962. He enrolled and finished the program of painting at Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. He exhibits works regularly since 1981. In 1982 he founded the "movimento homeostético" (homeoaesthetic movement), which works were shown in a small number of exhibitions and which will have its first retrospective exhibition next year, organized at Serralves Museum. His work has been acknowledged natioal and internationally. He had his first individual exhibition in 1984, in Portugal, and from 1987 on he also starts exhibiting his work outside Portugal.

During the late 80s he started a cycle of installations in which he continues working, in a permanent work-in-progress. In this works he uses poor materials, structuring them according to existing architectures or constructions that emphasize the multiplicity of the dynamics of framing. The pieces of painting and installation complement one another in Pedro Proença’s work, materializing attempts to serialize the “plurality of the subject” and constantly answer to (more or less current) questions he finds in the artistic field, and to which he cannot remain passive.

He also develops work in illustration, in books for children and adults. He also writes, and he has published fiction (The Great Tantric Gangster), poetry (O Homem Batata [The Potato Man]) and essays (A Arte ao Microscópio [Art Through an Amplifying Lens]).