FACING JUCA (english version)

I shall begin with a declaration of interest, afection and predilection. 

2003. I was Creative Director of the late Basement. A “home” of singular people, with a peculiar trend to attract underdogs, leftfielders and general revolucionários. It was this subversive magnetism, or maybe just the conditional reflex of a time where difference meant value that brought Juca to us. 

One day somebody said “a young bloke came by and dropped this. I’m not sure if it’s for you.“ (or something like that). 

This was a cardboard box that looked like it had either been runned over by a car or picked up in a random rubbish bin as an end result of a skipping night out. 

Inside this, there were 3 blue cloth toys, hand sewed in an imature way with handbuttons for eyes and refugee looks on them. They came identified, each bearing his own name tag: tenhofomi; quebolacha; dordibaliga.

Like a children who beholds a new toy I immediately shared the unusual portfolio with the rest of the agency and with Paulo Rocha - my creative superior. Juca started to work with us and with him started a long and ongoing adaptation process..

Designing for clients - quoting Paulo Piedade, the name we soon discover as his own, was some sort of indecipherable algorithm created to help linger a soulless reality - my own words, as i find myself uncapable of reproducing the exact expressions used in his own terms to justify his demotivation.   

Jucapinga was a toymaker, a paintor of feelings and a sculptor of personalities who inhabitted a paralel world, standing in between his capeverdian heritage and the shocking waves of the western african-american legacy. To us,  Juca was our Basquiat from the south side of the river and that thought brought  a smile to our faces, combined with the right amout of paternalism. We were happy to have Juca. And before the pernicious tides of saudade hit our shore.. we can say we still are.

Step by step, his fantastic universes with a culturally mixed language grew inside us. His painted, illustrated and sculptured creations unveilled a rare sensitivity for storytelling of unlikely heroes and obscure missions.

Inhabitants of a secluded, inferior world. The same world nobody notices but remains there, watching us in the corner of our commited and responsible lives. Ugly beasts with a soft heart. Wise and colourful mutants. Leftovers of people who only kept their soul. Pieces of us.

Jucapinga uses childness as a throwing gun, not willing to hurt but willing to exist. He builds a language invisible to seriousness and authoritarianism, taking us all back in time as if we were once again children in the presence of candy, free of analitical rules. In an irrational twist of life, we learn how to play again. That’s his legacy in me and it seems that Jucapinga made the decision of leaving his legacy in the rest of the World. 

Facing Kabu opened on the 4th of February in New Cross, in an old police station converted into a DIY art centre in the southbank of the Thames. An exhibition curated by Plasticina, Duarte Cavalinhos’s London based artistic agency, launched to become a bridge between Portugal and London in all contemporary art matters, and supported by the vibrating and cunning portuguese diaspora who resides there.

Facing Kabu gives us a different Jucapinga. Which is a good thing as his roots are still there.

A northern Jucapinga, closer to anglo-saxon wonderlands but slightly distanced from his complex imaginary dialects, for me the hardest part in the translation of his work. A more consistent, project focused Juca. More aware of procedures whilst dedicated to build higher conceptual buildings, less visceral in their expression but  better shaped technically. Without losing spontaneity, Juca condensates the conceptual recycling narrative, precisely exploring it with a sharper composition as if hiding the technique behind the story. His disposition of cutted cardboards, often structured on glued academic waste, bring several layer characters to life. Good and bad, beauty and beast, pure and degenerate characters, just like we all are in different moments of our lives. The resourcefulness of a 1940’s background environment, in a free translation of american gangster reality with Sherlockian steams and imaginary criminal elements of today, placed against a Cape verdian saturation is only used as a diversion to undermine our references,  removing us from what we think is laid upon our eyes and bringing us down in a self interpretative journey, culminated in the acceptance of his world as something unparallel.

Facing Kabu is Jucapinga adapting, as he always have done, moving in between the crossroads of what drives him and what is closer to his heart. It’s a plain-to-see evolution of his artistic sense, of his notions on esthethic and composition, of his capacity to compose a story with several chapters in the open book an Art Gallery can be. It’s also a Jucapinga assuming a role that belongs to his inner self: a story teller. Facing Kabu is an eye opener, a mind the gap. It’s him saying  that we should take it easy and see the big Picture while losing ourselves through the characters in the apparent discipline of the scenario.  From afar, a mechanically produced, almost perfect aesthetic. Come closer and discover Jucapinga’s roots, infiltrated in the wearness of the surfaces, in the bits he tore off, in the materials that he brought again to life. 

Facing Kabu is to take on London, minding its narrow alleys, its boundaries and its society consequences. Facing Kabu is Jucapinga daring expectations. Challenging the future to hurry himself up. To face Jucapinga is to embrace the ludic as an emotional release, in the end of another day in this cold and serious world.

Translation by Pleasures of the damned