- Blind Image #90 belongs to the emblematic
“absent images” series that João Louro has been developing since 2001. Realising the entropy that results from the excess of images in the present day, the artist creates silent and monochromatic compositions that convoke references from cinema and literature in the reflection on time and the visual literacy of the contemporary world. It not only leads to an iconic imagistic as it subverts it in what seems to be a revision of our visual universe, by convoking what is invisible in an image and what lies latent in it, activated also through the textual narrative that accompanies it.

The text in the inferior area of the work - - “She sat on my chest, pinning my shoulders down with her knees. When I attempted to budge, she pressed a clenched fist against my lips while her other hand went to work on my belt buckle.” -
which by its composition resembles a film subtitle, refers to the worldwide known romance - Lolita
by Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, adapted to the cinema in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne.

The erotic suggestion of the sentence appears as a paradox to the absence of image. The surface, of large dimensions in white Plexiglas, reflects and returns the gaze of the spectator, making its presence indispensable to activate the work. This surface, apparently empty, becomes a place of possibilities, present in the tension between the visible and the invisible, in the suggestion of an image through the words. Simultaneously and essentially, it reveals itself as a mirror, that allows the spectator to see him or herself portrayed, making this provocation part of its sense, or in other words, the spectator becomes the mental creator of the missing image.

João Louro, an artist that comes from conceptual and minimal art, creates openness and countless resignifications on the reflection around language and the value of images through personal references in constant actualisation.