If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well”. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. In 1977, already, Susan Sontag has called the attention, in About Photography, to the dangers of the savage proliferation of the imagery pictures: “Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. In a imminently visual contemporaneity context, in which the excess can degenerate the visuality ethos, João Louro chooses to erase images. There isn’t, nevertheless, any gratuitousness in this action, or possibility, of switching off. The same is valid to Dead End’s, metallic panels that, at the resemblance of traffic signs, indicate a place but, in this case, the place never reveals itself or still, to the neon compositions, whose disappearance is found at the distance of a gesture – the one of turning off the light. On the works that put together this series, Louro proposes absent images, so to the describing legends of situations, movies or social encounters, it is only correspondent a reflective monochrome. Let us take the series Blind Images as an example.

It is not established, therefore, between this two existing ways – presence and absence – a contrasting relation or an antinomy one, not even its (apparent) opposition results of an structuralist operation, in the sense that the two elements act as strategy, containing, in a inter-relational logic, a transitory function: the presence happens by the absence and the other way around. This way, each artwork extends itself beyond its materiality as it is endowed of an insoluble exterior ontology, that transforms it in a infinite possibilities’ field. the simultaneousness of the image’s presence and absence (usually of the same image) produces, by its aporetical condition, a matter and form indetermination, making the artwork to be, at the same time, artwork in act and artwork in potency. (It is not by any chance that one of the artist series has the title Dead End’s). Literally, from the ancient Greek a+poros, without a way out.

An aporia, as we know, constitutes itself as insuperable logical difficulty, problem, impasse, doubt, hindrance of proceed. There is an aporia that runs through João Louro’s body of work: the one of the insoluble sociability between the image’s presence and absence.

A Morte de Ivan Ilich by Leo Tolstoy