...ACONTECE QUE HÁ PHANTASMAS, POR ISSO NÃO TEMAS...
(...IT HAPPENS THAT THERE ARE PHANTASMS, SO DO NOT FEAR...)

Novos Artistas Fundação EDP Award, 2017 (shortlisted)

TEXT FROM THE CATALOGUE
Filipa Oliveira

Speaking of his mnemosyne atlas, in regard to ones relationship with images,
Aby Warburg defines it as a “ghost story for adults”.
Bernardo Simões   Correia’s proposal for the EDP Novos artistas Award, fits perfectly in this story of images as ghosts. Ghosts that inhabit our history, the art, the past but also the present and our personal memories and narratives.
We live surrounded by the ghosts of the images and each new image we see refers us to another one that is only present as a spectrum. Each one is haunted by every image before it, being in itself a spectrum. 

In his installation ... acontece que há phantasmas, por isso não temas... [It happens that there are phantasms, so do not fear], (2017), Simões Correia presents a group of sculptures and a set of digital images projected on suspended fabrics. The sculptures are in pigmented plaster, that evokes the idea of small sarcophagus that store away images or genies and refer to a pre-conceived notion of the archeological artefact. Each one of the sculptures appears ceremoniously​ placed on a plinth and subtly, but carefully illuminated. The drawings carved on them also refer us to an iconographic lexicon in the way of the ancient egypt sarchophagus, where the images reflect the qualities or deeds of whoever reposes in them. This apparent solemnity is exposed as we get a closer look and realize that the “pompous” shapes come in fact from daily objects like baking moulds, vases, buckets or tupperwares. Both scary and funny these sculptures deliver the idea of image-treasure- romantic and melancholic: humoristic and potentially catastrophic – hidden inside a sealed box that can one day be opened again. They are a semblance of an absent figure. They refer to the past but they are absolutely in the present. Alongside with the 6 sculptures, Simões Correia presents 5 digital slides over suspended muslin fabrics. The projections trespass the canvas and invade the walls bathing the sculptures. The canvas (and the images as well) move along as the visitors pass.  

The logic of the spectrum present in the sculptures remains through these projections. The photograhic image is always a ghostly image, and it is really only Light. The ghost of the past things. This is the destiny, even the ontology, of each image: to be a ghost. And in out digital world, this destiny has been accelerated. The image, and knowledge looses its physical body to gain a new one: a semblance-body, algorithmic body, cyber-spacial-body. Making itself present is revealed as an apparition. Each image is then an event, a structure based on the spectral. 
So, it happens that their are ghosts... 

The projected images are either digital drawings or hand made drawings scanned and edited on the computer and finally composed and closed into a digital file. They come from things that the artist sees, of ideas he has, of sounds and conversations he listens to, of other images with which he confronts himself, of drawings that start happening and then transform into something else or even old drawings. They come from several origins: classical myths, anglo-saxon mythology, jewish-christian culture, literature, contemporary music and even other artists like Henri Rousseau, Peter Doig, Lothar Baumgarten or Francisco Tropa. They appear from intuition and of a visual sense not a rational logic or narrative. 

The images are drawings and the drawings are apparitions: ghostly realities built as a metaphysical reflection of the contemporary virtual world. Among fabulated archaeological findings and virtual collage-drawings, this work questions the way we build, we relate and keep images now-a-day. And proposes a new place to think the velocity and complexity of the post modern virtual reality. 

This work doesn’t limit itself to the exhibition room.
​During the exhibition period, on the website www.bernardosimoescorreia.com you can subscribe to receive, by email, the digital component of this project. Here the unpredictability of the ghost apparitions, now completely digital and virtual, is highlighted.


Specifications:
5 video-projections of digital images on 5 suspended canvas of mousseline cloth, 
pigmented ceramic plaster and digital files sent by email. 
Variable dimensions

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