The Adventures of Anything

There are at least three ways to look at these drawings of Portuguese artist André Ruivo, and all involve incompleteness. First, each seems to develop new episodes in the life of Herman Melville's Bartleby, that famous scrivener. Bartleby was a hero by absence, whose refusal to work was accompanied by the same repeated words, a magic formula: “I would prefer not to.”

Ruivo's characters are moving figures, burdened with both a self-destructive and deceptive sense of humor. They exist closer to the logic of urban dromology as opposed to Baudelaire's flâneur. They wander in empty cityscapes and along Sunday streets. The drawings also betray a Pop drift: in the colors, the human forms, and the theatricality of gestures and props—objects indifferently place in perspective, geometrized, everything excessively garish and musically rhythmic. Memories of a certain psychedelic submarine percolate. 

Finally, in these drawings, it seems as if nothing is going on. Or almost nothing. Or nothing important. But isn't there, after all, something? 

Designed by Ideias com Peso

Published by Stolen Books, 2018

Softcover, 40 pages, full color, 5.9 × 4 inches

ISBN: 978-989-54176-1-2