Exhibition Opening: André Romão - The Monster Dresses in Mirrors

The Monster Dresses in Mirrors
André Romão 


Exhibition opening: 15_12_2016 / 19.00
Exhibition dates: 16_12 – 4_2_2017

The work of André Romão is deeply rooted in the process of reawakening, reappearance and historical returns. History and the material and immaterial residue it leaves behind, than serves the artist as a point of departure for the construction of a new sequence of narration, which although seemingly abstracted, is through an intricate web of relations and associations interlaced with the politics of the present. 

The Monster Dresses in Mirrors however presents us with a return that is two-fold. The first is a return of the artist to a language and to the formal origins of his practice. The second return are the themes introduced by the exhibition as such. Here through a controlled process of gathering, reuniting and animating, André Romão awakens the themes of a historical context, while building up on the symbolic value of its subjects. These are than reactivated through a poetic play of metaphor, association and opposition.

The animated Western Freeze of the Parthenon in Athens, which governs the exhibition, serve us here as a reference to the process of the above mentioned gathering, awakening and reactivation. The cold and inanimate stone is brought to life along the sound of a rhythmic beat by drummer Quim Albergaria. The initially fragmented and seemingly dead is united in a search for a new common and a new polis. The past, the present and the future are intertwined by a play of materiality and opposition, may it be by the hardness and the coldness of the stone, or by the artificiality and the transparency of the plexiglas sculptures, which enthrone dead bodies of exotic wasps. As if suspended in time on their journey to the north, we might see their gathering as a projection of a possible future or a reflection of a former past. After all the monster does dress in mirrors.


Markéta Stará Condeixa

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André Romão (1984) is one of the key representatives of artists of his generation. His work has been presented in a number of institutions such as Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), MACRO - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Rome), 98 Weeks (Beirut), Spike Island Art Center (Bristol) Kunsthalle Lissabon or Serralves in Porto among others. His exhibition at Syntax presents a series of new works developed especially for the exhibition.