Alan Fontes is an artist who researches pictorial language in the era of technical imaging. In a post-industrial context, painting is characterized as post-production: it draws on the cultural repertoire to resignify, recombine, and reprogram elements of art history and everyday life. It is an aesthetic recycling that gives meaning and increases the survival of cultural objects that overinhabit—and are therefore in a continuous process of oblivion—the contemporary imagination. A "micropiracy," to use a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud—the theorist of "post-production"—is underway in the installation "The House," which Alan Fontes presents at Paço das Artes.

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The choice of the house as the object of his investigation already demonstrates the artist's approach. He is interested in what is familiar. He is interested in disrupting the asepsis of the exhibition space with a setting that every visitor can identify with: a table, a sofa, a television, a shelf with common objects, potted plants, toys, rugs, chairs, and... paintings. Alan Fontes's painting does not exist outside this constructed environment; it presents itself acclimated to the intimacy of the (re)known space; it presents itself not as a hermetic work of art to be deciphered or rejected, but rather as an integral part of the shared universe and, therefore, captures us unarmed, inviting us to approach.

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But the initial impact of recognition is followed by another, a shift from the sphere of the familiar. All the rooms in the house and the objects that occupy them are painted gray. The color appears only in the paintings and, surreptitiously, as noises amidst the grayness, in a green lampshade or in the occasional piece of furniture. "The House" contains something strange or sinister, because the paintings stand out as something more real than the furniture in its pseudo-real materiality. Thus, the rooms of this deviant dwelling lead the observer to recognize the familiar in the flatness of the canvas that represents the house, rather than identifying it in the three-dimensionality of the household objects. The contrast between one register and another unbalances the experience of the work.

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A journey that oscillates between inhabiting the space and inhabiting the painting leads us to unveil the micropiracies contained in the canvases: an arrangement of stuffed animals reminds us of the work of Annette Messager; a pillow thrown on a sofa stages a pattern by Beatriz Milhazes; refrigerator magnets form a small collective exhibition of acclaimed works; countless self-portraits by Alan Fontes adorn the walls of the various rooms. These and several other reprogrammings of the dead archive of Western culture are reborn in the artist's post-production endeavor.

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It is interesting to note, as a conceptual fold in Alan Fontes's production, the cultural recycling the artist undertakes between one exhibition of his works and another. The artist's production itself is subject to reprogramming. Thus, an ecological cycle of extreme coherence is completed. We are faced with a creator who does not infest the world with novelties but, rather, is concerned with giving a worthy destination to the repository of novelties put into the world by all the creators who preceded him. Thinking with Félix Guattari, we can say that Alan Fontes exercises in his work the three ecologies (mental, environmental, subjective) advocated by the French philosopher as a new aesthetic-ethical-political paradigm, that of "ecosophy."