The art community has the resonance of evoking global issues, reinforcing the reflection of ethnical questions, where social concerns are increasingly more made evident through art works, rather than on social reason. The exhibition Murder Letters shows artworks from eleven prominent young artists and just as in different letters, what is displayed here are fragmented views of a city. In this particular case the setting from which they write about is New York City.

Across the floor of Lisbon’s gallery Filomena Soares, 21 sculptures and photographs, projections, installations and performances are shown. Notably, what is at the centre is not what we tend to remember the most from appealing places but as with letters, it reverberates the most disturbing private recollections. A mixture of artworks displayed as chaotic membranes of one of the most layered realities, acting as linings in a live organism, blowing up indulging impertinent behaviours and mythic elements.

Playing both with text and image on contemporary iconographic element either from high and low culture, Dan Colen’s The Pursuit of Happyness (2008) develops a vision about human abandonment, indigence incompatible with social reason, whereas male humour is the protagonist. In one corner there is a sort of place to venerate contemporary conspicuous physical destruction – drugs, guns and money on one side and Saddam Hussein picture on the other. Untitled (triptych: table drugs, toilet, gun/money) and Untitled (Saddam Dick) both made by Dash Snow, in 2007, are reminiscences of a ‘zeitgeist’, similar to Nan Goldin’s pictures and Larry Clark’s movies. But perhaps the best illustrative artwork from this appealing intersection is Hanna Liden’s video Dead Nude Chiling with Death and Fire (2008). A vision exploding at the interception between the lightness of romantic landscapes and the Dark-Goth’s music.

Murder Letters is a vision with aesthetic form about the grime social context. Written in verse, rather than in prose, it has an imaginative and sensitively emotional style of expression, in the relation of creation and the spectacle of immoral opulence.

‘Murder Letters’ with Carol Bove, Dan Colen, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Josh Smith, Agathe Snow, Dash Snow, Banks Violette, Aaron Young at Filomena Soares (Lisbon), from April 3rd to May 10th 2008. Curator: David Rimanelli.

Texto publicado na revista Internacional de Arte Lapiz, edição de Maio de 2008.

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