Macau-based Portuguese artist José Drummond recently launched his latest solo exhibition I’m Too Sad To Tell You at the gallery of the Orient Foundation featuring photography, video installations and music.
The exhibit explores a narrative built from the incapacity to express feelings and comprises the most recent works by the artist, supported by New Vision and promoted by the cultural organization BABEL.
Among tears, paintings and nocturnal wanderings, water appears as the transverse element that links together the three photographic series that make up the exhibition.
How To Dry a Face Full of Tears takes its inspiration from one of the most famous works by American artist Man Ray – the photographic series Tears – “in which Ray photographed a mannequin and everyone thought, for a long time, it was a real woman,” explains Drummond.
“My idea was the opposite,” notes the artist. “I tried to create almost magazine photography and, with that, call attention to the way women are treated in magazines, as mannequins or as all these stereotypes and female beauty that are vulgarized in fashion and lifestyle magazines,” he adds.
The walls of the Casa Garden are also filled with Think Of The Saddest Thing In Your Life, a series from which one of the photos was selected for this year’s nominee list for the acclaimed Sovereign Asian Art Prize. The set of five photos shows a lake that José, “on insomnia nights” sometimes visits.
“On the lake, I took a projector to alter its light. This also has to do with some impressionist paintings. There is another side that seduces me very much, which is being able to guide people’s imagination to see other things,” says the artist.
The central piece of the entire show – physically inserted in the central room of the Orient Foundation – is a video installation associated with the “idea of multiplicity, shadows and mirrors”.
“The installation comes as a continuation of a certain narrative of an encounter missed and lost charm between two people, or three, or four. There is a series of layers that were added to the image and also music,” explains the artists, highlighting also a certain “notion of infinite” associated with the mirrored installation.