NUNO ALEXANDRE FERREIRA

22.03.06/04.04.06

"Ecstasy" é integralmente constituído por planos de caras de rapazes retirados de clips pornográficos de livre acesso na internet. Estas cenas depois de juntas e manipuladas, apresentam uma sucessão de estados de êxtase entre o deleite, o enlevo e o estretor.

The artistic career of Nuno Alexandre Ferreira has evolved in such a way that, most of the time, he was the one who motivated his artistic reflections and concerns, the preferred icon of his images. So much so that one of the subjects he is most preoccupied with is the personality cult, the popularity or passion inspired by some people in the media. So, there are a number of works where this artist puts himself in the situation of these popular figures to recreate and honour them, also perhaps to bring them closer and make them more vulnerable, or to imitate them, as a real possibility to reach the marvellous Mt. Olympus of fame.

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Along these lines we find the photographs “Kurt (you know you are right)”, 2004 e “Joe (little)”, 2004, in which he portrays himself as Kurt Cobain, the rock star who died of an overdose or as Joe Dallessandro, the famous fetish actor of Warhol’s films, to whom, by the way, Ferreira bears a striking physical resemblance - to choose between these two personalities (like in the case of Madonna, or Kate Moss), is quite symptomatic of our purpose - owing to their meaning, aesthetics, their intrinsic beauty and the paradoxical way they carry out their role in society - these modern heroes - these men fetishes, with their ambiguous, strange and perverse erotic fascination, have a strong sense of homoeroticism, clearly showing the qualities of what is queer.

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Works done for publicity are an essential part of the iconographic repertoire of Nuno Alexandre, to the point that he transforms himself into the model Kate Moss and recreates the ad for a perfume for men called “Obsession” made by the fashion house Calvin Klein. The famous ambiguity of the photograph itself depicing a boy-girl, who with his/her back turned to the spectator, offers himself/herself up to the possible obsessions of the spectator, are taken up and embodied by Ferreira, who in “Obsession (for men)”, 2000, is prepared to create all kinds of obsessions in men. This piece clearly shows the full range of the potential for upsetting and destabilising masculine roles, which, on the other hand was always the intent of the work of Nuno Alexandre (I am reminded of “Crying game”, 1998, with the artist himself crying on-screen or in the video “Bride”, 2001, where like a dervish monk dressed in a wedding gown, he dances on a knitted bedspread, perhaps part of the trousseau). A kind of masculinity which, he now examines, making use of gay pornography, material that is widely used in the daily life of millions of people all over the world, but loaded with symbols of morality, rejected, denigrated and stigmatised by gay orthodoxy. And precisely for this reason, it is of utmost interest to queer art and culture, in the sense that it offers possibilities without taking into account the transgression of genders, identities, narratives, sexualities, spaces, bodies and in short, their affections. An ideological and cultural space so marked and so controversial that it has invariably become material that is tempting to reconstruct and to be reviewed in art. Nuno Alexandre Ferreira is well aware of it, and for this reason “A Luta”, 2004, “Ecstasy”, 2005, and “Trip”, 2005, arise from the manipulation of pornographic material. They are works whose magic resides in the action in slow motion and the repetition of a very brief moment of the film which here takes on an unusual and surprising artistic beauty. These nude men at play in what appears to be dressing rooms in “A Luta”, or washing a car with their bodies in “Trip”, or close-ups of the faces of men, somewhere between religious, sexual or chemically induced ecstasy are also so deeply moving as to be devastating, and are right on the mark as a reflection on masculinity, camaraderie or desire between men.

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Xosé Buxán Bran

parts of the text published in the catalogue from the exhibition “Radicais Libres”, Auditorio de Galicia, Santiago de Compostela , Spain , 2005.

http://omelhoranjo.blogspot.com/2006/03/ecstasy.html