As comet Halley skirted the Earth, António Palolo’s anthological FOTOCÓPIAS [Photocopies] was created at Centro Nacional de Cultura, where he was a resident artist.

This multivocal work resorts to visual materials photocopied in black and white, revealing Palolo as the most singular creator of Portuguese Photocopy Art.

In the course of a two-week period of intense experimentation, Palolo manipulated the Xerox photocopy machine, devised icons, stars, bodies, architecture, concretism and abstraction and social commentary (on peace, ritual, eroticism, the pure revelation of art’s glorious past and an evasion towards the most beautiful future).

Photocopy rises to the aesthetical category of cinema through a variety of frames and visual illusions.

Tactile stimulus, citation, appropriation, collage of disparate visual elements (photography, print, stained glass, sculpture, decoration, design or lettrism); from primitive representation to illuminations and neon – a unique propagandizing of the history of the artwork.

Resorting to photographs – in which a variety of images paralyzed by the shutter are juxtaposed – magazine, newspaper and art book cut-outs, scientific illustrations, astronomic charts, drawings, gallery exhibitions environments, television images, etc.- the paper twisted, crumpled, given a slanted doppler effect; a variety of photocopies briming with detail.

The original FOTOCÓPIAS were produced by Palolo in 1985.

In 1991, 500 of the over 1000 photocopies that he had gathered were selected – most of them printed on both sides of the A4 sheet. The artist was keen to publish these works in a book, or as six boxes covered in black (2), cobalt blue (2), yellow (1) and red (1);

Grouped in six tomes with a certain thematic bent, numbered in pencil, given names linked to some of António Palolo’s myths.

To wit:

Tome 1 - kubrick – a journey in time – from the void of ohm [desambiguar: ohm eléctrico, ou om yógico?), to the astral observatory, into the clouds, following comet Halley’s saga, loosing itself among the galaxies towards the metaphysical silence of the universe’s end.

Tome 2 - wilde – a collection of traces from antiquity; a catalogue of Mediterranean coins, Hellenic statues, Babylonian gods, monumental evocations of Egyptian, Indian, Inca idols, a repertoire of superb archaeology.

Tome 3 - nostradamus - fragments of Roman, Arab-Andalusian, futurist, Bauhaus architecture; a play of planes and lines, volumes, webs, visions of the Beyond, skull, mummy, distortion, gesturalism.

Tome 4 - duchamp – photocopies of drawings, paintings, sketches, the author’s own graphisms; thicket of textures, re-exposure of the motif to the most disparate treatments; attempts at showing differently what had previously appeared in another medium; stylistic alliterations of the most refined plastic sense, self-revelation, work in progress.

Tome 5 - genet – homoerotic sequence; the face, the mouth, the sex; the athlete, the model, the naked soldier; lascivious body of ebony and ivory; gaze of love; the enamoured couple; Sodom; lyrical orgy; genital epiphany.

Tome 6 - warhol – the insinuating musicality of discourse; printing of advertising semantic units, de/ collage; bizarre representations of objects, animals and plants; dream abstractions; portraits of celebrities, military characters, socio-political ideology, the interception of war in life, an escape into space.

Instant pictorial metaphor; pastel, arabesque, trace; glass, mother-of- pearl, aluminium and coal, lead and silver; water – pristine figurations of sculpture, painting or bas-relief; numismatics and recovery of classic antiquity imagery; episodes such as the Afro-American strikes or the Maharaja’s tour with his retinue; a rose is a rose is a rose or the astrological sign; poster, portrait, science fiction narrative, the pure poem of male beauty – pop portraiture; cybernautic personalization of the comet; sudden discovery of archaeological remains; temple, street, uniform, ritual, helmet, nipple, navel, pubis, weapon, star, phallus, finger, clip, totem, Zen allegory, druidic magic – each photocopy is a recursive icon, it redoes itself across small series, by theme – theatre of a magnificently realistic tone, desire for the cosmos. Naked love and hallucinated war.

Renaissance reverie, Hollywoodesque flash, a descent into the profane, the forbidden, and its apocalyptic redemption – the juxtapositions illustrate a new cubism heightened by multiple spaces in tungsten skies, in the black holes of perception and parallel universes poured over cream.

Textures in uncanny hues, grain, shadow, chiaroscuro, primitive darkness or the whiteness of a missile’s fire; porn print, interplanetary geometry; light, immense white light; an avalanche’s sliding, brushstroke and aspersion, millimetric grid; a cloud’s cotton, basalt iceberg, an ibis’ tar and feathers; a lung’s radiographic mist, smoke, fumigation; the bottom of a well; libidinous satellite and sensual astronaut – stains…ashes and ashes - dust, slime, trace, adamantine facet, line, ejaculation, jet-black point, a tear’s gleam, angel wing.

Repetitions, a play of globular structures, video synapses, imaginary panoramas, - a thief’s journal, the triumphant project of modernity.

As if in these FOTOCÓPIAS António Palolo had offered his autobiography to posterity.

Or maybe even his reveries, a glimpse of chaos, pain and death, the perpetual human love, mystical and sacred representations – virus and nurses; a speck of nothingness incrusted in oneiric memory; imagetic fluxus of a paradoxical philosophy.

Music of the world, noise of infinite spaces.

Translation by Rui Cascais