Final Fantasy is a final tragedy. Angela Od created the allegory of the death of her main character, O Cara da Espada, and unites two researches in this show: that of embroidery and that of video. Final Fantasy appropriates the name of a video game to underline the narrative character of the hero who is the protagonist of the artist's research. Although intimately present in the production process of the artist's embroidery, the look at digital processes and contemporary phenomena could be new to those who see her narrative embroidery. This exhibition aims to show how the two practices are interconnected for the artist. Through embroidery and work in line, wool and fabric, Angela has investigated the repetition of characters that sometimes refer to the Middle Ages, now to contemporary times. For the first time, however, the artist shows video works that use computer graphics to narrate short cycles, phases and epics of the characters that appear in her tapestries.

 

The Bayeux tapestry, a huge embroidered rug, dating from the 11th century, which describes the key events of the Norman conquest of England by William II of Normandy, for example, is often mentioned by Angela as one of his main references. If in the embroidery works the mentions of art history are more direct, the videos that investigate the three-dimensionality and the projective design, through computer graphics, can be thought of in the light of productions such as that of Harun Farocki or the Brazilian researcher Arlindo Machado [1] .

 

For Farocki, if photography freed painting from the idea of ​​compulsory realism, computerized images could then free cinema from its commitment first, aiming at other possibilities. Before studying painting, the artist worked with computer graphics to create pieces and vignettes for mass media. If the paint ceases to appear directly in Angela's practice, concerns about planning, staining, composition and color fields remained - Od exercises a vocabulary of dark colors: blacks, burgundy, navy and earthy reds combined with bluish, gray and violet .

 

In Angela's thinking and doing, the line of contours of the virtual image is joined to the line that legitimately pierces the fabric plane repeatedly to compose embroidery. The modules of the talagarça are geometric designs like the low tech pixels of video games. Although anonymous, without proper names, the characters exist, they live journeys and epics precisely because they were created by the artist - they usually resemble friends from Angela's circle of friends, who pose for a photo shoot and create a file from which to investigate the composition of their works. A vocabulary of poses is studied through montages and prints of digital collages. Designed with the aid of a computer, embroidery becomes a design that is sometimes abstract, in which the colors are worked in a template, one by one.

 

French Hellenist Jean-Pierre Vernant, author of numerous works on Greek mythology, interprets all mythology as a binary opposition between principles, such as male and female, forest and home, street and home. In Final Fantasy, such a point of view asserts itself as the possibility of demarcating a less binary, more complex narrative. In a collage of references, Angela Od operates concurrently in Paradise, Purgatory and Hell.

 

Ulisses Carrilho

curator

 

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[1] Machinima is a term created by the combination of the English words machine, animation and cinema. Since the first films made in digital games in the 1990s, the notion of machinima has been associated with the conventions of classic cinema as a film production technique. These films are predominantly produced with personal computers, as opposed to large cinematographic productions that use professional 3D software.