We finish our review of the screenings cycle that took place during the “Art Madrid-Proyector'20” program with the BUT Film Festival (Netherlands) and the three Portuguese proposals of InShadow, Loop.Lisboa and FUSO - Lisbon Annual Festival of International Video Art.

While FUSO and Loop are exclusively dedicated to video creation and film proposals, InShadow and BUT host more cross-cutting initiatives where different disciplines are worked on or they give way to more experimental and underground works. For Art Madrid, Loop and FUSO came up with a joint proposal around the work of the artist João Cristóvão Leitão.

The InShadow festival presents the best of transdisciplinary artistic creation in the areas of video dance, documentary, performance, exhibitions and installations. Its 11th edition was held at a dozen venues in the city of Lisbon: Marioneta Museum, Teatro do Bairro, Portuguese Cinematheque, Junior Cinematheque, Santa Catarina Space, Mercês Cultural Center, Marvila Library, Appleton Square, FBAUL Cistern, Ler Devagar, Gallery Otoco and Fnac Chiado, with various proposals and unpredictable encounters between cinema, dance and technology.

The artworks selected by InShadow for Art Madrid were: "Complex of shadow", by João Afonso Vaz; "Mujer vacío", by Max Larruy y Berta Blanca T. Ivanow; "Excuse my dust", by Maria Stella Andreacchio, Stefano Croci & Agata Torelli; "Makyō", by Brian Imakura; "The act of breathing", by Hana Yamazaki; "Bubblegum", by Ryan Renshaw; "Walls of limerick", by Arturo Bandinelli; "Alta", by Antti Ahokoivu; "Sculpt the motion", by Devis Venturelli, and "Brute", by Cass Mortimer Eipper.

Frame from "Mujer vacío", by Max Larruy & Berta Blanca T. Ivanow

BUT Film Festival is one of the most alternative projects on the international scene and is exclusively dedicated to B series films, Underground and Trash Films. The organisers announce that during the five days of the festival, there will be an extra dose of films full of violence, absurdity, creativity and pettiness.

They warn that they are looking for visitors who... : • Aren't likely to scream at the sight of blood! • Will be able to admire creativity to absurd extremes! • Like to combine a cozy atmosphere with watching films!

BUT participated in Art Madrid with the following artworks: "Zure Zult" (2016), by Angella Lipskaya; "Birds of a Feather" (2019), by Dann Parry; "L'ours noir" (2016), by Méryl Fortunat-Rossi & Xavier Seron; "Fabulous friendly cooking" (2018), by Nicky Heijmen & Tobias Mathijsen; "Bravure" (2018), by Donato Sansone; "Ringo Rocket Star and his song for Yuri Gagarin" (2019), by Rene Nuijens; "The Scuzzies" (2019), by Jimmy Screamer Clauz.

Frame from "Birds of a Feather" (2019), by Dann Parry

Loops.Lisboa is an annual exhibition presented by Festival Temps d’Images Lisboa and the National Museum of Contemporary Art since 2014, it is a unique showcase exploring the loop as an essential form of the language of film and video art. Starting in 2020, it becomes part of and international network dedicated to the form the Loop. The network includes: Mario Gutiérrez Cru (Festival Proyector, Madrid - Spain); Sandra Lischi (Onda Video, Pisa - Italy); Tom Van Vliet (WWVF, Amsterdam - The Netherlands); Cine Esquema Novo collective (Porto Alegre - Brazil) and Irit Batsry and Alisson Avila Loops.Lisboa/Festival Temps D'Images (Lisbon - Portugal).

FUSO was created in 2009, as the only festival with an ongoing national and international video art program in Lisbon. FUSO showcases in free outdoor projections, at Lisbon’s museum cloisters, video programs that are selected and presented exclusively for the festival by national and international curators. In addition to the proposed programs, each year FUSO also honours one or more artists who are historically and fundamentally important in video art. One of the main aspects of FUSO is the promotion of new national creations through an annual Open Call contest open to Portuguese artists or foreign artists living in Portugal

Fotograma de "Ulysses' Portrait

“Ulysses’ Portrait” by João Cristóvão Leitão (Loops.Lisboa Award, 2015).

The video is part of a trilogy that includes Irineu’s Portrait and Mónica’s Portrait, Jury’s Award and Audience Award, FUSO: Anual de Vídeo Arte Internacional de Lisboa.

"Ulysses’ Portrait" is a giddy journey through time and through literature. A journey where Ulysses is entrapped by the mechanism that is the loop, which operates at a narrative level, at a spatio-temporal level (given the use of a single sequence shot) and at a visual level (by means of the constant reuse of the same imagery material). After all, "Ulysses’ Portrait" is nothing more than an act of questioning human identity when confronting it with the possibility of time’s circularity and with its objective and subjective durations. Ulysses is Ulysses. However, that doesn’t mean that he isn’t, simultaneously, Cervantes, Pierre Menard, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Homer, Tchekhov, Nietzsche, Borges and, undoubtedly, myself as well.

João Cristóvão Leitão earned a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre (Dramaturgy) at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School and a Master’s degree in Multimedia Art at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (FBAUL/CGD Academic Merit Award). Currently acquiring a PhD in Fine Arts by the same institution, researching subjects related to the practices of expanded cinema and to the literary and philosophical universes of Jorge Luis Borges. Also obtained training from Guillaume de Oliveira (2013) of the Oskar & Gaspar collective.

As a creator, he develops performance, video art and installation projects, which have been displayed around the world (Austria, Brazil, England, France, Ireland, Italy, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Peru and Portugal) and have been awarded several times.

The work of Cedric Le Corf (Bühl, Germany, 1985) is situated in a territory of friction, where the archaic impulse of the sacred coexists with a critical sensibility characteristic of contemporary times. His practice is grounded in an anthropological understanding of the origin of art as a foundational gesture: the trace, the mark, the need to inscribe life in the face of the awareness of death.

The artist establishes a complex dialogue with the Spanish Baroque tradition, not through stylistic mimicry, but through the emotional and material intensity that permeates that aesthetic. The theatricality of light, the embodiment of tragedy, and the hybridity of the spiritual and the carnal are translated in his work into a formal exploration, where underlying geometry and embedded matter generate perceptual tension.

In Le Corf’s practice, the threshold between abstraction and figuration is not an opposition but a site of displacement. Spatial construction and color function as emotional tools that destabilize the familiar. An open methodology permeates this process, in which planning coexists with a deliberate loss of control. This allows the work to emerge as a space of silence, withdrawal, and return, where the artist confronts his own interiority.

The Fall. 2025. Oil on canvas.195 × 150 cm.

In your work, a tension can be perceived between devotion and dissidence. How do you negotiate the boundary between the sacred and the profane?

In my work, I feel the need to return to rock art, to the images I carry with me. From the moment prehistoric humans became aware of death, they felt the need to leave a trace—marking a red hand on the cave wall using a stencil, a symbol of vital blood. Paleolithic man, a hunter-gatherer, experienced a mystical feeling in the presence of the animal—a form of spiritual magic and rituals linked to creation. In this way, the cave becomes sacred through the abstract representation of death and life, procreation, the Venus figures… Thus, art is born. In my interpretation, art is sacred by essence, because it reveals humankind as a creator.

Between Dog and Wolf II. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.

Traces of the Spanish Baroque tradition can be seen in your work. What do you find in it that remains contemporary today?

Yes, elements of the Spanish Baroque tradition are present in my work. In the history of art, for example, I think of Arab-Andalusian mosaics, in which I find a geometry of forms that feels profoundly contemporary. In Spanish Baroque painting and sculpture, one recurring theme is tragedy: death and the sacred are intensely embodied, whether in religious or profane subjects, in artists such as Zurbarán, Ribera, El Greco, and also Velázquez. I am thinking, for example, of the remarkable equestrian painting of Isabel of France, with its geometry and nuanced portrait that illuminates the painting.

When I think about sculpture, the marvelous polychrome sculptures of Alonso Cano, Juan de Juni, or Pedro de Mena come to mind—works in which green eyes are inlaid, along with ivory teeth, horn fingernails, and eyelashes made of hair. All of this has undoubtedly influenced my sculptural practice, both in its morphological and equestrian dimensions. Personally, in my work I inlay porcelain elements into carved or painted wood.

Between Dog and Wolf I. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.

What interests you about that threshold between the recognizable and the abstract?

For me, any representation in painting or sculpture is abstract. What imposes itself is the architectural construction of space, its secret geometry, and the emotion produced by color. It is, in a way, a displacement of the real in order to reach that sensation.

The Anatomical Angel. 2013. Ash wood and porcelain. 90 × 15 × 160 cm.

Your work seems to move between silence, abandonment, and return. What draws you toward these intermediate spaces?

I believe it is by renouncing the imitation of external truth, by refusing to copy it, that I reach truth—whether in painting or in sculpture. It is as if I were looking at myself within my own subject in order to better discover my secret, perhaps.

Justa. 2019. Polychrome oak wood. 240 × 190 × 140 cm.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

It is true that, on occasions, I completely forget the main idea behind my painting and sculpture. Although I begin a work with very clear ideas—preliminary drawings and sketches, preparatory engravings, and a well-defined intention—I realize that, sometimes, that initial idea gets lost. It is not an accident. In some cases, it has to do with technical difficulties, but nowadays I also accept starting from a very specific idea and, when faced with sculpture, wood, or ceramics, having to work in a different way. I accept that.