Addressing Strategies to Undress Norms (2022)

Even though Tales Frey can hastily be called a performer, the title, in fact, does not account for the many languages that cross his transdisciplinary investigations. Driven primarily by drawing and the body, the artist built a path that accumulates experiences from the scenic universe, such as acting, costume design, dramaturgy, scenography and theatrical direction, in addition to dance and choreography, and visual art languages, such as sculpture, objects, photography and video art.

Addressing Strategies to Undress Norms is Tales Frey’s most comprehensive solo exhibition in the city of Porto, where he has lived since 2008. Plastic propositions arising from the interweaving of so many references and artistic languages are displayed. The sculptures, clothes, drawings, objects, video, and photographs challenge taboos constructed by the culture of so-called “compulsory cisheteronormativity” in a playful and sarcastic way. The affirmation of identity in a world hostile to non-heteronormative experiences is a natural issue in the artist’s visual dramaturgy, based on art criticism, theories of gender, performativity, and others.

Tales Frey’s practice is autobiographical, because as he himself points out, “performance is a genre in which inevitably the artist’s self is often exposed”. In a series of performances, for example, he converted his birthday rites of passage into actions, turning them into artistic rituals. The desire for constant and profound experimentalism, combined with a vast contemporary cultural repertoire, achieved an aesthetic radicality in the artistic form.

Through experience with performing and body arts, the scenic and temporal elements are present. Faithful to the fiction of art-life, the artist uses the loop as a linguistic, visual and dramaturgical resource, mirroring and repeating images in media in addition to video. The double, whether or not thought of as a doppelgänger, is present in pieces that are fragments of bodies, some sculpted to be worn by spectator-users. In a very original way, Tales Frey creates an activist, critically committed, ultimately ironic and sensual visual-performative multidisciplinary poetics. For him, “the body is pivot”, something that his propositions do not leave us doubting.

Daniela Labra

 Curator

OBRAS

1) Il Faut Souffrir pour Être Belle, 2018. Photo, 70 x 50 cm;

2) Sissyparity, 2020. Photographic polyptych, 80 x 63,5 cm each;

3) One Hundred and Thirty-Two Corporeal Figures as Sign Mediations, 2020. Video art, 2’48”;

4) Gushing, 2022. Ink on paper, 33 x 22 cm;

5) Order Araneae, 2022. Photographic polyptych, 40 x 40 cm each;

6) Suruba I and Suruba II, 2022. Ink on paper, 45 x 25 cm each;

7) Thighlighting, 2022. Kinetic acrylic objects, Diameters 100 cm, 60 cm, 30 cm;

8) Tucking, 2022. Installation, 200 x 120 x 50 cm;

9) Conductive Wire, 2020. Video, 4’48”.

See folder: LINK

Clipping

Artecapital Magazine de Arte Contemporânea, December 15, 2022

Video recording of the opening of the solo exhibition Addressing Strategies to Undress Norms. Espaço Mira, Porto, Portugal, 2023