Marked by the postulates of conceptual art and minimalist movements, João Louro began to explore the relationship between visual language and written language from an early age, questioning how images can be described by words, and how words can be, as sign and meaning, suggestive of visual images. The complexity of the issues surrounding the visual character of the word and the discursive (verbal) character of the image are reflected in a body of work that manifests itself through a wide range of media - photography, text, sculpture, painting - and which takes as its privileged sources the universe of art history and contemporary culture.

Consisting of several series produced over several years, the - Blind Images

project began in the 1990s as a reaction to the entropy caused by an excess of visual information. Here, the images are hidden under a homogeneous layer of acrylic, with only a textual description standing out. The absence of visual action is only apparent, as the viewer tends to mentally replace the obliteration of the images with the descriptive framework suggested by the captions. On the other hand, the - Plexiglas

covering each canvas creates a mirror effect in which the viewer sees themselves reflected, filling the empty space and thus reinforcing the visual quality of the whole.



In this series (#204), the blacked-out images correspond to photographic records of the Battle of Verdun, one of the major events of the First World War and one of the first armed conflicts to be systematically documented and disseminated through photography.



João Louro retains an interest in the discursive systems that condition and direct the possibilities of the gaze, questioning and reconfiguring them in works that function as a critique of the image itself, and which remind us that absence can be more expressive than any literal representation.