LISBON.- MAAT presents the exhibition Gestos by Ana Léon, in the Ashtray 8 space at MAAT Central. An artist who first appeared in Portugal in the 1980s, Léon settled in Paris in the same decade, where she still lives today. The artist works in parallel with drawing and film, using analog technology (film and a Super 8 camera) to make stop motion animation films in which she recreates the movement of bodies from images captured one by one. In both fields, the artist has always developed languages of great simplicity or austerity of means.
In this exhibition, presented in six successive rooms, a significant number of male figures, almost always shown in “American plan” and dressed in very simple clothes, perform a restricted number of repetitive gestures in a loop. These figures can hardly be distinguished from each other. The feeling of depersonalization is accentuated by the fact that the extras are repeated from video to video, representing different pieces (or different scenes from the same piece) with the same closet, the same type of temporality, gesture, scenography, chromatic dominant, lighting or sound background.
The models Ana Léon uses are Action Man. They are around 25 cm tall, made entirely of plastic and metal components, and are perfectly articulated (neck, arms and legs, wrists and toes). The choice of dolls he works with is not determined by whether or not they are male models, but by the expressive neutrality (or even inexpressiveness) and physical mobility that defines them. João Pinharanda, the curator, writes in the exhibition guide: “Ana Léon also boycotts the conventional role of traditional animated puppets by denying them any narrative dimension: in fact, in her short films, nothing happens or what happens is exclusively descriptive.”
Ana Léon (Lisbon, 1957) lives and works in Paris. She has a degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and a Masters in Aesthetics from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Her artistic work has developed between drawing and film. She has been exhibiting since 1982, both individually and collectively. Solo exhibitions include Azulvermelho (with Pedro Calapez, Galeria Diferença, Lisbon, 1982), installation at the Ménagerie de Verre (Paris, 1992), Metamorfoses (National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon, 1994), Drawings and Films (Centre Culturel Portugais / Fondation Gulbenkian, Paris, 2003), 7 Films (Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema, Lisbon, 2005), Strip-Tease film (Théâtre du Rond-Point, Paris, 2007), Bodies, CAPC - Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, 2021). Group exhibitions include Instalação (Galeria Metrópole, Lisbon, 1983), Arquipélago (SNBA - Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes, Lisbon, 1985), Lá Fora (Museu da Presidência da Républica, Lisbon, 2009), Variations Portugaises (CAC Meymac - Centre d'art contemporain, 2017), A Metade do Céu (Fundação Arpad Szenes - Vieira da Silva, Lisbon, 2019), Tudo o que eu quero - Artistas Portuguesas de 1900 a 2020 (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon 2021) and Histórias de uma Coleção - Arte Moderna e Contemporânea do CAM (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2023).
Ana Léon's work is represented in collections such as CAM - Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Museu de Lisboa, Fundação Carmona e Costa and Fundação de Serralves.
