Portrait of Henrique Loja
Cité Internationale des Arts
Paris, France
2023
His paintings then evoke sceneries to meditate in, spaces in margins, like coasts or caves. Yet I wouldn't refer to them as still landscapes. Henrique Loja experiments with pigments, plastic and organic matter to create bundles of chemical and metaphysical reactions. He composes hypersensitive surfaces, breathing artworks, reacting to natural and physical substances, as much as to invisible, impalpable, forces. The artist goes so far as to leave his works outside of his studio, in the open air. Not to dry them, but to let them breathe and enter
in contact with external elements. They’re wind-cuddled, rainkissed, sunburned. These gestures of collaboration with the non-human also allow him to question his own responsibility in the act of creation. How to let go of some of his 'power' without losing his intention? His approach seeks to deconstruct the capitalist ideas of potency, productivity and competition in the creative process and to replace them with laziness, procrastination or collaboration.
Works become companions. When they’re not weathered, canvases can also then find a seat at a table: painting while cooking and eating, Henrique Loja offers his works the possibility of an epicurean purge. The porous paint feeds on the slightest spill. Spirulina swallowing, herbs and bacteria infusing, in a spirit of biohacking. They’re sometimes messy, others sassy, pimping it up with repurposed fabrics, earrings and spikes. They live, therefore they age. Dust and rust gives them a worn out tone and a little plaster on their skin eventually fixes them as eternal portraits of abstract archetypes. Now and then, behind layers of time, stickers and coffee stains, one may even recognize a proper face (countryside emo boy, 2020). It seems to be a portrait of the artist as a teen in the peak of the BlogSpot era.
Growing up in a post-Internet realm, Henrique Loja spent hours learning the basics of html coding in order to spice up his pages and customize his online persona — forever toying between works of autobiography and autofiction. He also enjoyed playing video games, finding pleasure in the ability to easily shift realities and in the possibility of gaining potential in other domains. To this day,
he has been working on personalizing his world and (conceptually and materially) building others, while consistently breaking down hierarchies of mediums, genres or subjects. High, low, subcultures belong to the same axis, now turned horizontal in the shape of a browser tab. In a dynamic of doomscrolling and compulsive window opening, his research on the Symbolist movement can suddenly end up on the same level as an episode of The White Lotus. Somehow it all makes sense: he speaks of Odilon Redon's butterflies as magical symbols of transformation and optimism in a dark dark world and quotes Jack's words and philosophy (in season 2, episode 6): “What I’m saying is, we’re fucking lucky. We’re living in the best time in the history of the world, on the best fucking planet, if you can’t be satisfied living now, here, you’re never gonna be satisfied.”