Jorge Molder

Scarbo

13 SEPTEMBER 2024 - 2 NOVEMBER 2024

Artist Bio

Jorge Molder was born in 1947 in Lisbon.

Molder was trained in Philosophy at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. He worked as a military psychologist at the time of the Portuguese Colonial War.

Molder uses his body to create his works, establishing categories that are based on analogies and relationships, allowing him to form groups and series of images to determine visual and conceptual hierarchies.

In 1977 he held his first solo exhibition. He has a national and international career as a photographer and his creations are part of both private and public collections, such as those of the Caixa Geral de Depósitos, the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento and the Centro of Modern Art José de Azeredo de Perdigão of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Outside of Portugal, Molder's photographs can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Artothèque in Grenoble, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracusa (New York), the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain and the European House of Photography in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the Extremadura Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art in Badajoz or the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Jorge Molder was a guest artist at the São Paulo Biennial in 1994 and represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 1999. In 2007 he won the AICA ( International Association of Art Critics ) award.

In 2010 he won the Grand Prize EDP / Arte, one of the most important awards in Portugal in the visual arts field.

"There is a moment when things combine (...) Therefore, there is a moment in which the hands join themselves to the melody, to the story and to all of that fiction. And then there is a posterior moment in which we fictionalize that whole encounter (...) Scarbo is a genie and, as such, it has a bad side and a funny side. I wouldn’t say good, let’s not exaggerate."

Jorge Molder in conversation with Miguel Nabinho

Isto

“- Well, this is all a big confusion!”

It was all I could hear from a group of six men, still quite young, that spoke lively, close to Savoy hotel’s entrance, in Fasanenstrasse, Berlin. They all spoke at the same time; the only exception was one, maybe the youngest, which seemed alien to what the others were saying, and whistled. Whistled with conviction and persistence. The others seemed not to notice, as if the whistling was a natural companion to what they were saying.

The figure of the spirit who denies immediately came to my mind…

By that time, I smoked cigars, always with big vitolas, that I am certain of, and I remember I always searched for places that were well adjusted to the smoke and its lengthy time. I had my burrow in each city.

This is all I imprecisely remember of that scene, which might as well have happened in another city or at another hotel or, even, in another time. At the end I might have actually been inside the Savoy hotel, in a spacious room, and that conversating group was in the table next to mine.

And I, very comfortably installed, always imagine that a sudden interruption shakes the scene, leaving nothing but the appetizing cigar, the phrase I retained and the whistle. Like a clear image which suddenly becomes clouded and fragmented in a unexpected quake.

And then everything is unrealized.

It is like this almost every night. The confusion, the places, the smoke and the whistle on repeat. As I have mentioned before, all of this could merely be one of those dreams which repeat themselves and occur throughout our lives. Their inhabitants are not necessarily inexistent, but their mixture and their solidity have an equivocal balance.

I think about this many times, in this powerful force we have to combine things which reach us from such different origins and are of such different natures.

There seems to be an excipient of an obscure provenance which connects all, combines everything and escapes us, without us ever noticing its powers and effects. It is these approximations or, perhaps, attractions that give life to what we imagine. Like the paw of a cat which catches - hunts?

Not that everything that comes close is a part of that which we don’t quite know what it is. There are the things we don’t know, it is true, but there are also the ones we summon with knowledge, by suspicion, by intuition, and still by who knows what.

Nothing is that easy, as the Genie would say.

It is a doing or happening that accompanies us, but that can also go back, an understanding that something escaped it or a power of finding what it does not know.

This is the way things go around us. Why do things go around us? On the one hand, we don’t know, it is part of a mystery; on the other hand, we are almost certain that it is about our stubbornness in not being able to exist without dragging what we catch with us, even without knowing why.

But let us get back to the beginning. There I was smoking a nice cigar at the Ritz hotel in Madrid, or in some other place, I don’t remember it well, when I heard a conversating group say: “- Well, this is all a big confusion!”.

I never knew what confusion was that, even though it deserved my full agreement.

Of the boys of the group, the one that whistled remains. I recognised the melody immediately, it was familiar and I never forgot it. Nor will I ever forget it.

Jorge Molder, translated by Luna Dimas