João Alves

“Obsessive creative since 2000, pocket and mural painter, musician full of films, sound and gadget engineer, character in 2 movies, amnesiac illustrator, trainer and trainee of prisoners, gardener of poets and among other unclassifiable activities also member of the collectives Arara, Faca Monstro and Marvellous Tone.”

[João Alves, b. 1983, Porto]

LABYRINTH OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS

According to logic, the entrance door directs us to a space that ends as soon as we cross the exit door. Most commonly, the same port has dual function, both to enter and exit. Through the universe conceived in the image and likeness of João Alves, one enters directly through the exit door, animated by the daily life and customs of beings composed of bodies and souls which are ambiguously ectothermal and aerospacial pilgrims of fertile soils and migrants beyond the troposphere and the mesosphere, creatures close to humans and eventually by a Man and sometimes a Woman, fallen angels entertained by their own attraction for Chaos, Mother Moon and Father Sun and other Astral Brothers of this Cosmos and Others. They are notes of the timelessness of the human condition of our world trough more or less rough acrylic brushstrokes, sometimes more often less, in that seemingly controlled naïf way, through symbols and forms that by tradition channel deep forces. They are grotesque and “brutesque” and even delicate scenes of creatures from this world and the other, in which men are portraited more from the inside than from the outside, making known the fears of their time, the Hell and the notion that the Devil is everywhere, and also within us, or in him, with reference to scenes of his own daily life, always in opposition to the other side, to what is “good”, to that which gives pleasure and happiness, even if it does not appear on screen.