João Penalva's work is engaging and playful, even when he's reflecting on mortality, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
Take a quick look around João Penalva's exhibition at Imma, or flick through the accompanying book (a work of art in itself, incidentally), and you might instinctively recoil, thinking you are in the company of yet another earnestly pedantic conceptual artist who is going to subject you to a prolonged exercise in wilful obscurity. In fact there is a playful, engaging quality to practically all of Penalva's work and, as he says himself, he is against the kind of conceptual art that leaves people in the dark: "I make my work so that it is understood. I make it to be understood." This is absolutely true, but it's important to add that we come to understand it through engaging with it; a glance isn't enough.
It's not enough because the work is usually time-based, consisting of surprisingly substantial texts that we have to read, or videos or slide sequences that we have to watch. It's notable that even when Penalva uses video, he tends to like static images. The movement is in the language rather than the images. He is a kind of storyteller who tells shaggy dog stories in the sense that there is a curious circularity to most of what he does. Each piece tells the story of itself, or becomes its own story, or invites us to put together the story ourselves. We learn about what we are looking at, but also about looking, more generally, as well as stories and language.
BORN IN LISBON in 1949, Penalva left Portugal in the early 1970s, when the country was ruled by a fascist regime. He had been called up for army service and, if he'd stayed, he would have been dispatched to fight in a bloody colonial war. At some risk, his father signed a document saying that João was visiting Spain for the day. He simply didn't go back. They were all desperately worried about the possible repercussions. "My father could have gone to prison. But in fact they simply forgot about me. Which is unheard of."
Initially he studied contemporary dance in London, and he went on to work with leading choreographers, including the celebrated Pina Bausch, a leading exponent of dance-theatre. But Penalva was dissatisfied with pursuing dance as a career. "There is a saying, which is not entirely fair but not entirely untrue," he says, "that dancers think with their feet. In any case I asked myself if it was possible for me to move on." He threw himself into being a painter, studying at Chelsea (he has been based in London ever since). He worked initially in a very formalist mode, perhaps consciously distancing himself from theatrical narrative.
Yet narrative crept back into his work. He made a series of paintings based on 19th-century silhouettes. On impulse, for one of them he made an additional panel of text: a list naming the characters in the image. "That was my first narrative work." Naming the silhouettes opened the possibilities of a narrative, and he hasn't looked back since.
There isn't quite such a thing as a typical Penalva piece - once he feels comfortable with something, he says, he tries to do something diametrically different. But Mr Ruskin's Hair is perhaps as good an example as any.
The initial project became a story that is now incorporated into the work. Having found a lock of Ruskin's hair preserved in a small, glazed frame, he made seven others, seven fakes of Ruskin's hair, and exhibited them all at the South London Gallery without distinguishing fake from real. But one of them was stolen. It turned out to be one of the fakes. So Penalva was asked to make a "fake" fake, to take the place of the "real" fake, an idea he loves.
Such ambiguities abound in his work. His 50-minute video piece Kitsune features wonderfully atmospheric images of misty, rugged, wooded hilltops. "We shot it in Madeira," he explains, "but it reminded me of the landscapes in Kurosawa films."
So he decided to make a Japanese narrative to go with the Madeira imagery. He devised a story around a fox. Why? For typically offbeat reasons. He liked catching sight of foxes by the Serpentine in London. Foxes feature large in Japanese mythology and folk tales. There are no foxes on Madeira. Penalvan logic dictated that the story had to be about a fox.
Out of all this emerged a piece that does indeed seem Japanese. So much so that many individuals who have seen it insist that the landscape is in Japan, and that the notion of it being in Madeira is just an additional layer of artistic subterfuge.
"After a screening in Japan," Penalva recalls, "when I'd explained how it all came about, a Japanese girl in the audience stood up and very politely told me that, contrary to what I'd said, she knew this very place, and it was certainly in Japan. I just didn't know what to say."
Not that it bothers him. It is in the nature of the work. Other people have talked to him about the story, saying they knew exactly where he'd got it, and invariably it turned out not to be the case. He shrugs.
"I've said before, some day, when I have the opportunity, I want to do another version of Kitsune, with the same footage, but with a narrative spoken in Swedish. Then people will think: Bergman. And they will recognise the location as being in Sweden."
ONE OF THE most moving and beautiful pieces in the show is set in Hiroshima, based around one of the few buildings to have survived the bombing relatively intact. Invited to do a project there, Penalva was intrigued by the weeds that sprouted from the bare concrete in the region of this building, now a school. He enlisted an elderly local botanist, Mr Watanabe, to collect, preserve and catalogue the various weeds.
They are all there in Addressing the Weeds in Hiroshima, and they are surprisingly impressive plants. Putting together the various aspects of the piece, we gather that Penalva is using the tenacious weeds as a metaphor for the inhabitants of Hiroshima, stubbornly surviving, and bringing the city back to life in the face of the most horrible circumstances imaginable.
Mr Watanabe, Penalva says, has since died, but in a curious way the work has become a memorial of sorts to him, touring the world, and he sends regular reports back to Mr Watanabe's widow in Japan. This is in keeping with what Penalva identifies as one consistent, underlying concern in his work: "I think there's always something going on about mortality, but with some humour. I hope it's serious, but not heavy."
João Penalva is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham. Tel: 01-6129900