There is a sort of immediate fascination with a work that is parallel to the main practice in an artist’s oeuvre. Such is the case of António Palolo (1946-2000), an artist who began showing his work in the city of Évora (his hometown) at the early age of eighteen. Unfortunately, the recognition of his film work – which had started in the 1970s and 80s – came somehow belatedly. In it there is a keen attention to the experimental transformation of the image and the availability to carry it out. Subtly informing his wider known pictorial work (and alluding to the Dada, pop and psychedelic references that emerge in between the lines of his plastic oeuvre) Fotocop (Photocop) is nevertheless a set of images whose investigative nature teases out an obsessive and mysterious quality that was less recognizable in Palolo’s oeuvre. The vast set of photocopies was produced in 1985 in Lisbon at Centro Nacional de Cultura, where Palolo used Xerox technology to launch a new logic of visual composition. Two versions of this work are now shown according to the installation instructions described in a text by Jorge Lima Barreto (1947-2011), with whom he often partnered in the 1980s and 90s.

As they generate a worldview, the photocopies (over four hundred) simultaneously produce a clarifying perspective of the theoretical and formal content in Palolo’s pictorial work, albeit with an interrogative flavour. Unexplored until now, the content of Fotocop manifests in a set of photocopied sheets (front and back) which Palolo punctuated with coloured stickers to signify the rejection of a particular image. The logic of the sequence inherent to this work presupposes that all the images produced and selected by the artist are defined on only one face of an A4 sheet, photocopied from the original and simulating a cycle of reproduction faithful to the original xerographic technique applied by the artist to the documents he used. A part of the rejected images demonstrates a repetition of elements that appear in other photocopies but are the outcome of a composition adjacent to that which the artist chose to explore. Various references to other visual artists, namely through art magazine and newspaper cut outs, are also rejected although there is a small group (nevertheless representative of various artistic fields) of citations of other authors in the photocopies approved by the artist (Marcel Duchamp, Louise Nevelson, Giorgio de Chirico, Merce Cunningham, Jackson Pollock, etc). This decision—which points to a desire to control the repetition and composition of the whole set —also shows a pondered exercise of reflection on the affinities that are more apparent in his own oeuvre (in their gestural and plastic character, as well as in their conceptual complexity).

In Fotocop e a Arte da Fotocópia [Photocop and the Art of the Photocopy], a text briming with a poetic and rhythmic quality, Lima Barreto describes a map for the organization of this object by subdividing it into six different tomes: Kubrick, Wilde, Nostradamus, Duchamp, Genet and Warhol. Despite their irrevocable relational elasticity, it is possible, through the sets of words and expressions that form each category, to identify the genesis of each element — either figurative or abstract—, assuming a margin for decision required by the images’ metonymic nature. A clear example of this logic of re-colocation is present in the frequent reappearance of the same photograph depicting the human body in part of a painting at Addaura cave (Palermo). Apparently referring to the Wilde category (which, as Lima Barreto tells us, incorporates archaeological elements), this image also demonstrates one of the first representations of a human homosexual relationship, which would also place it firmly in the Genet category (which contains a homoerotic sequence). A frequent phenomenon in this work, image repetition, despite its different framing, allows for a tuning of their repetition to the various tomes to which their different readings seemingly belong, both individually stimulating each section and potentiating a network of carefully entwined connections between the various representative sequences. As for the photocopies where methods of juxtaposition and collage succeed one another, several readings of possibly concealed meanings were undertaken, namely through an individual study of each image in the composition. In one of these instances, and as an example, there is the image in which the unmistakable German expressionism of a still from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) appears juxtaposed with Arabic architecture. One would surmise that Palolo is not merely interested in an architectural construction component, or just in the cinematographic image, but focuses instead on a compositional process that connects surrealistic film, the mystique inherent to its own fiction and the construction of a geometric composition. The same occurs when he juxtaposes a medieval topography and the print representing the passage of an astronomic body; when he enlarges ancient Mesopotamia statuary to the point of distortion; or when he suddenly transforms a war photograph into an erotic image. The research inherent to the creation of these categorical distributions entailed a minute and detailed analysis of every photocopy, generating a sort of referential inventory of repetition, re-composition and re-signification by evaluating the way in which visual re-occurrence in different contexts distributes the images across different categories.     

Wanting to remain faithful to the artist’s original idea in terms of turning the photocopies into objects with an installation character, the sole explicit extant instruction is to build six differently coloured boxes (two black, two cobalt blue, one red and one yellow) containing sets of twenty-five photocopies each. The boxes are then to be wall-mounted just like a bookshelf, which generates a sort of sculptural-pictorial object. However, in the face of an obvious absence of precise technical details to perfectly build the object, it was necessary to go through a process of interpretation far from their obvious conception, mostly due to lacking dimensions and chromatic attributions for the boxes, as well as for their contents and handling. These required the creation of a methodology based on two approaches: for the first, the prime reference are the formal qualities of Palolo’s visual oeuvre (i.e., chromatic variation, geometric construction, etc.); the second privileges the two clearer possible approaches to present the sequences (twenty-five photocopies from each category in each of the six boxes and/or six sequences of twenty-five photocopies of a blend of the various categories). Considering the total number of photocopies and assuming the extreme importance of excluding the minimal number of possible approved images, a calculation was carried out that would allow for the generation of possible sets of six boxes. Having obtained an odd number, the decision was to create the two possible versions of this work, i.e., two sets with two different approaches of sequential grouping. Another hypothesis was also to distinguish both objects according to box thickness, resorting to an approximate median of the width of the salient vertical traces in the paintings from the artist’s pop phase. What follows are two possible moments of Fotocop: one version composed of A4 boxes (given the sheet format) each ten centimetres thick, and a version with the same format with a variation in the thickness of the spine, now measuring three centimetres; the first version contains photocopies chosen according to a categorical approach, the second follows the sequential blend. In both versions, the colours are attributed to the same categories following a formal closeness in terms of their visual content: Kubrick (black), Wilde (cobalt), Nostradamus (black), Duchamp (cobalt blue), Genet (red) and Warhol (yellow). Although having been mixed, in the second version of the work there is a photocopy of the respective category in the first place, i.e., beginning the remaining sequence and respecting the external object vis à vis the internal content.    

Palolo’s interest in electrostatic art (a method used since the 1960s by Sol LeWitt, Patti Hill, David Hockney, etc.) is more than an innate curiosity about the possibilities of image reproduction: it follows a participatory predisposition towards artistic projects by other artists. Together with Jorge Lima Barreto and Vítor Rua, they developed various collaborations, particularly in line with the duo’s experimental, electronic and minimal music Telectu project. The cover of Off Off (1984) was the beginning of a creative relationship that was to last until Palolo’s death in the year 2000. Generated through xerographic manipulation of a photograph, this intervention corresponds, by and large, to one of the fist public appearances of the photocopy in the artist’s oeuvre (although it remained parallel to the rest of his production, which did not resort yet to non-authorial images). In the album Halley (1985), released in the same year as Fotocop was made, the cover features an image of the eponymous comet (visible in Portugal in 1986), which reappears countless times (both in written references and manipulated images) in the set of photocopies that complete this work. This interest in cosmical mysticism is apparent not only in Fotocop and his penchant for interstellar images and suggestions, such as in OM (1978), a film that precedes this work and entails a similar type of research, which concludes Palolo’s film experimentation in the 1970s. If there is a plastic relationship between the photocopy reproductions and the entropy that features in the artist’s films, that very trace is explored in the work’s languid transitions. As he films the gesture of painting the water in a bathtub, the artist generates (on the liquid surface) images whose abstract and mutable nature can, precisely, be associated with the cosmos. Indiscernible from a theoretical meaning regarding the nature of the images and the various references they bring together, both works share the same visual strangeness, surprise and candidness, which are heightened, in a second instance, by their extremely close sequential quality. The contact with Fotocop thus potentiates, although this might not be evident at first, a rhythm easily associable to the moving image thanks to the performative action that the viewing of the work calls for.

Translation by Rui Cascais