Shadows of Indetity
FEMA Gallery – Cascais, 2024
By Joana Tubal
Curated and Text: Bernardo Jose de Souza
FEMA Gallery – Cascais, 2024
By Joana Tubal
Curated and Text: Bernardo Jose de Souza
Part of what we call tradition is the result of relatively recent cultural constructions, many of them forged not much more than two hundred years ago, precisely during a period in which the world was undergoing major social transformations, partly due to the Enlightenment, partly due to the Industrial Revolution. The idea of tradition would therefore come to impose itself as a brake on changes that affected not only the spiritual and philosophical plane, but also the political and economic. The Kilt worn by the Scots is a good example of this, as well as the diversity of tartans attributed to them, which, in principle, would refer to specific clans. Today, however, we know that it was a recent creation, from the 18th century, in reality a strategy to make the clothes worn in the Highlands suitable for factory workers.
On a broader social level, however, traditional clothing functions as a visual element capable of communicating a variety of possible political and cultural aspects: the distinction between social classes, between different functions in the hierarchy of social life and work, and, obviously, gender differentiation. As a kind of reaction to the process of globalization, the maintenance of traditions (from the Latin tradere, which means to transmit) has the function of consolidating habits and customs in a world in a permanent state of reinvention. While men’s clothing has remained relatively stable over time — largely as a simplification of military clothing for social interaction — women’s clothing, on the other hand, has undergone constant changes during modernity, especially as a result of fashion, a vector of consumption and a compass for cultural transformations.
In her current exhibition at the FEMA Gallery, the portuguese artist Joana Tubal will focus on women’s clothing from different cultures to develop pictorial works that confront us with the formal sophistication of garments whose visual signs are imbued with sociocultural codes. Her paintings, in this sense, reveal the liturgies, customs and traditions of a world resistant to the social changes experienced by the processes of globalization. Although almost all of the garments she portrays date from photographs taken in the 20th century, we have the impression that we are looking at women from distant times, completely removed from the feminist emancipation movements that have characterized the last one hundred and fifty years. Take, for example, the clothing worn by the women of the Azores, described by the writer Raul Brandão in 1926 as “a black and shapeless ghost”. Apparently, according to an article by Ana Maia, these garments—a hood and a cape—date back to the 16th century, when Flanders partially colonized the archipelago, although some say they date back to the 18th century, as an adaptation of the cloaks and hoods that had become fashionable at that time. Or, according to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the garments were intended to protect local women from the gaze of sailors.
However, what remains evident in the collection of images in this exhibition is the semantic, discursive and semiological potential invested in the clothes worn by the figures painted by Joana Tubal. Above all, derived from a highly fundamentalist charge—and here I am not referring exclusively to religious fundamentalism, but to all its forms and manifestations—, these garments have the power to blur the individuality, or even the identity of those who wear them, something that the artist will take to a climax when she strips her female figures of their own or particular semblances. Just as Brandão describes, the characters portrayed seem more like “ghosts” or even “monstrosities,” to use the Portuguese writer’s words.
By stripping the women of their features, the figures acquire a ghostly, almost inhuman aspect, something that is reinforced by the simplification of the forms painted by Joana. By creating a kind of chromatic geometrization of the figures and their costumes, the artist reinforces both the essentially formal nature of the clothes and their ability to hide the bodies of the women who wear them—ultimately, the clothing constructs new forms for the female figure. It is interesting to highlight the Japanese character dressed as a geisha in one of the paintings, since Eastern clothing, especially Japanese clothing, is characterized by giving the human body forms that are detached from the anatomy, something that generally does not occur in the West.
It is also worth remembering the pictorial tradition of the Iberian Peninsula, translated into the work of artists such as Zurbarán and Velázquez, whose penchant for portraying aristocratic and ecclesiastical clothing is expressed in paintings marked by peculiar shapes and volumes. Such works, already in the 20th century, would inspire fashion designers, especially the Basque Cristóbal Balenciaga, who dedicated several of his collections to the construction of dresses that reproduced some of the idiosyncratic forms of monastic vestments.
In the text The Habit Makes the Monk, by Humberto Eco, the writer and semiologist says that “The instruments of communication are equivalent to a series of functions that are interposed in the plane of the physical modification of events, while the instruments destined to execute functions and, therefore, destined to physically modify things, impose themselves on the universe of communication and become acts of communication, just as a specific type of hat called a miter is used not so much to protect from the rain, but to say: ‘I am a bishop’.”
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