23 OCT − 12 NOV

JOÃO LEONARDO / SEVEN SECONDS

Seven Seconds at Galleri Pictura is a collection of newly created artworks by the Portuguese artist João Leonardo. The exhibition expands and deepens the visual vocabulary started in his most recent exhibi-tion, in which an unusual yet familiar object has been collected and assembled to create the artworks: cigarette butts. This object's unrecognized status within the art world creates an interesting paradox. The dirty, used cigarette butt becomes something visually beautiful and organized. It is a trivial piece of waste as well as a desired object. Leonardo structures, organizes and creates beauty from this piece of waste. There exists a balance in his works, a line between the ephemeral and the persistent, of the organized and the unwanted. The apparently simple entity creates a structured context.

Seven Seconds comprises four new pieces. The first ones, Untitled (Head # 5) and Untitled (Head # 6), are sculptures that reproduces the artists head, replacing each square centimeter of skin by the lower end of used cigarette filters - mostly smoked by the artist. The third piece, Untitled (Brain) is a collage in the form of an enlarged human brain, also entirely made with new and used cigarette filters - mostly collected in the region. The last work, List of Chemicals, is a large size painting that depicts the names of all the chemical compounds identified in cigarette smoke.

On one level the exhibition could be seen almost as an anti-smoking campaign, but there is in fact a much more complex set of relations at work here. The contrast between abstraction and figuration is shown by the head pieces as actual visual representations of the exterior of the body and by the brain piece as an abstraction of the interior of the body. Both pieces do however still fall into the category of figuration as opposed to the totally literal piece of the List of Chemicals. The unsettling aspect of the works makes them resonate with a strong metaphoric potential and symbolic meaning. The relations between the works mirror the actual mechanism of nicotine addiction as well as reflecting the artist himself.

The title of the show refers to the time frame that it takes for nicotine to reach the brain when smok-ing. As nicotine enters the body, it is quickly distributed through the bloodstream and crosses the blood-brain barrier, reaching the brain within seven seconds after being inhaled.

João Leonardo (b. 1974) is an artist based both in Lisbon and Malmö with a MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2009. Between 2010 and 2011 he was an Artist in Residency at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany. Among his several solo shows the most recent ones were in Portugal and Germany. Seven Seconds is his first solo exhibition in Sweden since his examination show at KHM gallery.

PRESSVISNING 21 OKT 15.00

OPENING22 OCT 17.00-20.00

FOR MORE INFO PETER GERDMAN +46 (0) 762 303 553

galleripictura@gmail.com

www.joaoleonardo.com