Peau de Chagrin
Willem Weismann, Ernesto de Sousa, Musa paradisiaca, Titania Seidl
Eduardo Guerra and Miguel Ferrão (curator)
In 2001, a happening transformed the Quadrum Gallery — located fifteen hundred meters from the Quadrado Azul Gallery, in Lisbon — into a recording studio, whose scenographic apparatus allowed visitors to observe, directly and indirectly, the production of a pornographic film that would become part of the commercial circuit with the title Fantasia na Galeria, by Rita Ruby. We are now recovering it, a quarter of a century later, not for a remake, but to give it visibility in the light of La Peau de Chagrin, a novel by Honoré de Balzac published in 1831, whose narrative focuses on a magical object — the “skin of an onager” (donkey’s skin) — capable of fulfilling the wishes of its owner, but on one condition: With each wish fulfilled, the skin shrinks, as does the life of the desirer.
In the absence of the peep-show audience, bored by the heroic efforts of its live performers, take after take, are the melacholic disaster paintings of Willem Weismann, the intimate friendship of Ernesto Sousa’s graffiti, the dreams and autofictions of Titania Seidl and the objects of hypersensitivity of Musa Paradisiaca that stare at us, as we access, with intentionality and bravery, to the distant desires for freedom of that early twenty-first century.
