Introduction by Inês Pedrosa Director, Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon
Álvaro de Campos was gifted in the science of sex, the discipline that has the soul ascending up to the body, and that offers to humans the experience of eternity. The city, soil and steel, concrete and electricity, feelings and desires and noises and nerves all entangled, presented itself to the naval engineer's eye as the superior accomplishment of such science. A city is an organism that endlessly recreates itself, a mechanical fever in perpetual undulation. Álvaro de Campos' Lisbon is Fritz Lang's Metropolis stripped of ideological timelines -- the city that mangles and amplifies mankind. Sex, taken as a fusion of irreconcilable bloods, as D.H. Lawrence put it, is the raw material for urban construction -- translated in the fracas of cables, of craters, of cranes, of increasingly more sophisticated machines. Barbary and civilization, danger and comfort, death and life, share an infinite embrace. "Triumphal Ode" feels like it was written today because it comes from that place outside of time where Campos, even more than Pessoa himself, managed to live: the vertigo of sex -- which must not be confused with the melancholic, timely catechisms of "sexuality."
"Gazing is for me a sexual perversion," wrote Álvaro de Campos. Jorge Colombo, the innocent yet perverse imagemaker, a passionate reader of Pessoa's most visual, most visionary heteronym, decided to revisit the Lisbon that the poet-engineer invented -- an untypical, un-touristic one, the archetype of every past and every future city. Rather than imagining Álvaro de Campos resurrected in the first decade of the 21st century, Colombo has dared to penetrate Campos' timeless dimension to create a visual tone poem of the absolute city, anonymous and intimate, in an immortal combustion.
LISBON REVISITED
Photographs by Jorge Colombo after poems by Álvaro de Campos, an heteronym of Fernando Pessoa ------------------------- Hardbound catalogue, 88pp. 9 1/2" x 6 1/2" (25 x 16cm). Portuguese / English. Includes all exhibition images, plus a text by Richard Zenith and five poems by Álvaro de Campos. 15 euro (order it here).
