Pedro Barateiro. Palmeiras Bravas/The Current Situation

The works exhibited in Palmeiras Bravas/The Current Situation were conceived specifically for this show, and are linked by several narratives to produce a disturbing view of the current state of affairs of the culture in which we live. Extending the preoccupations of his previous work, Pedro Barateiro fosters the rapprochement of artist and spectator, where, in the context of late capitalism, the latter may be boiled down to a consumer whose perception has been constrained by the binary terms “desire” and “expectation” engendered by the market. It is with this underlying precept that the artist proceeds with his deconstruction of the perceptual changes provoked by the objects and images that he presents in this exhibition.

This focus implies a drift that the summoned by the networks of meanings surrounding these objects and images, as though, to be constituted, a particular field of signification had to allude to another such field, and so on, successively. This accounts for the hybridity of the elements constituting these works. Starting with a video as a prologue which locates in time a number of concerns about the contemporary world, we enter the first room of this exhibition, filled with a sculpture park conceived from logos of smiles now frozen, along by-products that belong to the system that distributes them commercially. We are then sent to the large images dealing with the causes of a plague of grasshoppers, superimposed on a pattern that eschews geometric order yet outlines a network in which the natural and the cultural are interwoven and a threat is inscribed, we then move on to the following room with a series of photographs, paintings and sculptures deriving from the expression “fulfillment center” as the origin and desire to be fulfilled or not by a distribution system, we come to the last space in the show occupied by a devastated hut and a video, where we hear a voice speaking in a series of episodes about the “current situation,” beginning from an overlapping of the reality of palm trees mortified by a plague in the Southern Europe and a demonstration outside the parliament.

This is the weaving of Pedro Barateiro’s world, as indeed of ours: a world that has long lost the hope of a system able to accommodate all of these objects, their manifest strangeness and the clash of powers, values and forms of knowledge that they invoke. These works, and more specifically, each image, each object, film or sculpture, thus occupies a borderline position, a zone of conflict, where the naturalisation of tensions and the mythification of the phantasmagorias induced by the differences among the practices and systems that articulate them, are invoked and deconstructed in the varied narratives constituting this exhibition.

— Pedro Lapa, Artistic Director and Curator of the Exhibition

A book with essays by Pedro Lapa, Margarida Mendes and Sepideh Bazazi around Palmeiras Bravas/The Current Situation, designed by Studio Manuel Raeder, will be published after the exhibtion.

Two of Pedro Barateiro’s films We Belong to Other People When We’re Outside and Feitiço/Spell will be screened at the museum’s auditorium on 14 February, and will be shown again on 14 March, 18 April, and 16 May, at 16h00 on each of those dates.