The adventures of anything by André Ruivo.
In Portuguese, Carton cover, in Portuguese, edition: Stolen Books 2018, Colors. Dimensions - 15 x 10 cm, 40 pages,
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And all of a sudden, there are three ways to look at these drawings, and all things reveal their incompleteness. Initially, each seems to develop new episodes of Bartelby's philosophy of life, of Herman Melville, the scribe. Bartelby was a hero by absence, refusing to give all the lectures requested, repeating, like a magic formula, "I would rather not do it." Bernardo Soares is not far from it.
However, André Ruivo's characters, with a self-destructive and deceitful sense of humor, are touching characters. Thus, they are closer to the logic of urban dromology of Baudelaire's flâneur. But they wander through an empty city, not full of people, a Sunday town and not an anonymous avenue or a busy Nevsky street. In these drawings, there is also a pop tendency: in the colors, in the human bodies, in the theatricality of the gesture, in the props, in the buildings of the city... all nonchalantly insightful, geometrized or planned, all uniquely extravagant and musically rhythmic - reminiscent of a certain and psychedelic submarine. Finally, in these drawings, it looks like nothing is happening. Or almost nothing. Or nothing important. After all, there is something. We can even say that very important things are happening."
João Pinharanda
