Joana Vasconcelos. The paradise at the antipodes of the real

The Portuguese artist shows her luminous technological gardens at Es Baluard

From the 5th of November 2009 to the 7th of February, at the Aljub de Es Baluard. Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Mallorca.

The manipulation of nature, its light and its color to facilitate human enjoyment and dreaming, both individual and collective, is the cornerstone of the oeuvre of this Paris-born Portuguese sculptor, Joana Vasconcelos.

In the darkness of El Aljub (the cistern) at Es Baluard, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Mallorca, Vasconcelos has designed a mechanical, ironical garden whose flowers do not gather light, rather they give it off and are wholly unfamiliar with the expiration of life inherent in nature. Vasconcelos is probably alluding to the paradise of Eden as a pure, natural place, but in the opposite sense: the work she is unveiling in Mallorca, Garden of Eden # 2, has nothing natural about it and flees from any notion of purity; yet it is beautiful and vast, as we tend to imagine that paradise being.

In her artistic output, this French creator who has lived in Lisbon for years usually appropriates everyday objects, sometimes vulgar ones, which she renders extraordinary by conferring on them a conceptual transcendence and using them to prompt dreams and illusions. She draws from the same procedure in this work: hundreds of decontextualised plastic vases like the ones you can usually find in Woolworth’s or junk shops make up a flowery, labyrinthine garden which, when viewed by the spectator, takes on an almost Versailles-like quality.  By turning the vulgar into something beautiful, Vasconcelos mixes the classical past with the technological present.

Garden of Eden # 2 follows in the footsteps of La Novia (The Bride), a work the artist unveiled two years ago at the Venice Biennale which depicted a fabulous chandelier made up of thousands of tampons only identifiable when seen up close. Vasconcelos’ works attract the public because they are spectacular; however, their striking aesthetic should not obscure their provocative message about today’s social mindset.

The work being exhibited at Es Baluard, though created especially for the historical El Aljub, is the second installment in a series that the artist began in 2007 with Garden of Eden # 1. Starting in March 2010, it will be on display in a sweeping retrospective that the Berardo Museum Collection is devoting to Joana Vasconcelos.

This show will bring together a selection of the best sculptures and installations by this artist, who, as mentioned above, is known for appropriating everyday objects whose meanings she then subverts to question today’s pre-established routines. Vasconcelos has been showing her works in Portugal and abroad regularly since 1994.