Exhibition. Sob outro nome: Under another name.Centro De Arte de S. João Da Madeira, Portugal. July 2008

The exhibition Sob Outro Nome attracted the following critical appraisal from the writer, poet and academic John Havelda from the Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.

He is, to my mind, one of the most important contemporary British artists. His work has always been ambitiously operatic in its scope, exploring the intermedia of drawing, photography, sculpture, poetry and theatre. I know of no other contemporary British artist who has explored such a vast terrain so successfully to produce work that simultaneously negotiates the tragic and the comic.
John Havelda, exhibition press release and publicity.

The essential theoretical and thematic reference for the work was the writings of early 20th century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa has been highly internationally influential within the art and literary worlds through his invention of a series of alter egos or heteronyms as he called them. These various individual fictional figures signed their names to his variously styled poetic output.

Sob Outro Nome takes Pessoa’s example as a starting point for a visual and literary investigation of the possibility of creation one’s artistic output from the perspective of various different aspects of ones own complex personality. Thus one figure works in painterly abstraction, whilst others work in documentary photography, figurative expressionism, figurative sculpture, automatic drawing, fetishistic ritual, romantic landscape etc etc.

The work and its accompanying publication thus add up to a reflection on themes of artistic self-definition. Thus the artist Robert Casselton Clark is posited as merely a curator of an exhibition of multiple works fictionally created by a series of make-believe artists and writers.

This was one of the first of several solo exhibitions I have staged in Portugal and began to develop a series of cross-cultural cross-cultural reflections between for instance the tradition of the English Romantic sublime and the Portuguese poetic tradition of melancholic saudade.