António Olaio + António Teixeira Lopes

António Olaio
This widow is blocking my windows, 2011

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António Teixeira Lopes
(1866-1942)

A Viúva,  1893
Marble
Col. MNAC-Museu do Chiado, inv. 212

THIS WIDOW IS BLOCKING MY WINDOWS

The starting point for my exhibition in the Museu do Chiado was obvious. Obvious in the literal sense because it is right there for every visitor to see.
Teixeira Lopes’ ‘A Viúva’ (The Widow) confronts us with a private state made public, by virtue of the simple fact that this is an object made to be exhibited. We cannot tell whether what prevails is her widowed or sculptural state, nor even if she is a widow that is a sculpture, or a sculpture that is a widow.
The sculpture has the narrative form of the most popular nineteenth century art, anachronistic and distasteful to the advocates of the modern spirit. Even so, her condition – or perhaps especially her condition – affords great potential for playing conceptual games.
Marcel Duchamp lamented the shedding of narrativity entailed in the path chosen by modernism. He had the credibility of being one of the movement’s pioneers and, also, one of its ready critics.
This ‘Widow’ by Teixeira Lopes is not quite that window sensually clad in black leather that Duchamp created in 1920. Yet she is still, in her eternal youth, a “Fresh Widow’.
Through the relationship between widows and windows, I found within this sculpture in the atrium of the Museu do Chiado, a plan for an exhibition that was almost complete. Complete, even, in terms of its conceptual scope.
All that was left was to make it. ‘This widow is blocking my windows’ is therefore an exhibition that grew out of that sculpture’s very condition.
And, with respect to the sculpture, I can state that:
‘Because of its undeniable erotic dimension, it occupies my entire field of vision. Obsessively’
‘By obscuring the windows, it leaves me only an interior space (introspection, or the inevitability of having to make do with an interior as my only exterior space).
‘Blocking my Windows, I bemoan this nineteenth century that blocks my computer. Or perhaps I bemoan the persistence of each past century that insists in lingering, that sees no validity in the symbolic value conferred on a mere moment, when one century becomes another.
The circular canvases take on an ocular aspect, a conceptual consequence of the connection between the mind and the eye, and the song in the video adds further meanings:
Your darkness is all I can see / I’m trapped in 19th century / Don’t know if it’s morning or night / Outside is out of my sight /...

Coimbra, 23 September 2011
António Olaio