Paulo Simão

Erased (2021) is not a gaze to the past but to the future! In Erased (2021) Paulo Sim o evokes Erased De Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg and, by manipulating a set of images from the US Library of Congress, reframes the archive and develops a series that invites us to a myriad of questions and reflections. Like Rauschenberg, when adding a subtitle to the photographic image, Paulo Sim o assumes that he erased to reveal, he took out to add and what has apparently been censored never ceased to be there. With his intervention Sim o creates a kind of anti-evocative monument and, by isolating the plinth, he opens a new perspective and approach to the artistic work, moreover, emphasizes the importance and role that the artist, the artistic work and, in this particular project, the evocative public art piece assumes by validating certain values, knowledge, historical events or collective memories. Finally, this sort of catalogue, that takes us to the photographic universe of Bernd and Hilla Becher, begins to reveal us the red lines, hidden by pixels that are no longer there or have been added as a result of today’s technological possibilities. One year after the invasion of the US Capitol we start seeing the questions Paulo Sim o want to address. Do we need new monuments and forms of celebration? What to do with monuments that already exist in public space, which evoke and celebrate historical events that are anachronistic and collide with a contemporary and humanist vision of society? How democracies deal with their colonial or imperial past and history? What is the role of schools, educators, cultural agents and the media in today’s society? And finally, invites us for a reflection about the difficulty that political actors face to get closer to citizens, in a world with less and less mediation and how misinformation is the perfect environment for the growth of populism. Paulo Simão 10/01/2022

A dip in Horace McCoy novel and Sydney Pollack movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). This project is a quote from a key moment from Sydney Pollack's movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They. It seeks to explore the dichotomy between poetry and violence at a time of profound crisis, a crisis on a world scale with effects almost as devastating as those of the Great Depression of 1929. Horses are a metaphor for the role of the citizen in society, the spectacle is now represented by the curtain, the mirrored surface at the base of the image and the search for the perfect composition of the toy horses. Printed fabric 240x300 cm

This project is about how memory is being replaced by digital technology and how, the end of the physical archive, affect us in the way we produce images and keep memories. In this post-truth time we find ourselves before the paradigm of the loss of memory and the unpredictable consequences of that on the course of history. 45 Archive file sheets (inside A4 Borderless Acrylic) Dimension 21x29,7 cm Metal box with 45 mounted slides (instalation)

In Rocket Boys, Paulo Simão provokes us, opens the door to restlessness and, at first, seems to take us to unknown territory, a place ruled by what is not familiar to us and where our need to create sense is called into question, disarming us. This initial startle is, however, simply a gateway to a visual essay which, more than reflecting on the current historical and social moment, confronts us with the Great Power, its portentous tentacles and how we passively watch populisms, dictatorships or strongly manipulative nationalisms take shape. By appropriating ten images with the hands of political leaders (from India, Pakistan, USA, Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Venezuela, China, Israel and Iran), presenting them purposely manipulated, pixelated, and by cropping them, limiting our visual field to little more than these prodigious and diffuse Divine Hands, Simão offers us a critical polysemy that deeply contrasts with the univocal language the Great Power intends to install. Today we move between reality and artifice, between the concrete and the digital, between the absolute truth and what can be a lie - the path is uncertain and its borders are unclear. Simão knows it and masterfully plays with it, uses the same weapons for opposing ends, shows it by hiding, manipulates it to make us think, crops to widen the view, censures to make us realise we are the ones being censored and so is the world we have access to. Rocket Boys doesn't offer a narrative, but it suggests several, it makes us unease, it impels us to think and to act. Ana Valentim

On going project

The Spectators (Citation to Guy Debord book and movie Society of the Spectacle)

We'd like to present Paulo Simão from Portugal, and his series, Goodbye Pyongyang. The series presents a disquieting reflection on the act of seeing and believing, through a fictional trip to North Korea. The republic is presented via a playfully coded visual game, which reflects on photography’s expressive privilege to make visible the hidden, to offer certainties that strengthen our desire to believe. Goodbye Pyongyang offers a singular enquiry that investigates precisely that force. According to the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, the conquest of the world as picture constituted the fundamental event of the modern age. And yet, that fulcrum (which is offered to us) is not to be found in reality, but in its artificial reflection, in the symbolic reproduction of the image. The partnership between reality and truth, having lost its erstwhile hegemony, is intensely being questioned by photographers like Simão. This challenge to photography’s previous aspirations to objectivity, this offering of an illusion of reality that treats the world as fiction, is precisely one of the key issues that Simão addresses. Goodbye Pyonyang offers observers the possibility to reconsider their visual codes, and revives a playful complicity between the image and the viewer. And we witness how that fictional trip, thanks to photography, has become real. Ângela Ferreira. Artist & Curator

Starting with a series of stereoscopic images, found in the digital archive of the Library of Congress of the USA, from the landscape in Palestine in 1915, Home and Away is a photographic essay on the impact of the wall between Israel and Palestine. The wall, built to protect the Israelis, makes impossible to Palestinians from moving freely in their territory, from treating and watering their cultivated land. That, compels them to rainfed crops, such as the olive grove, to minimize the damage caused due to the impossibility of regularly visiting their properties. In the end the impact on their lives and the local economy is devastating. On going project.