Vasco Araújo is the third artist to be invited to submit a piece specifically for purposes of e-mail distribution by EMPTY CUBE. In this case, a photograph that is part of a broader photographic project (a series of digital prints on paper entitled 'Act Without Words', 2013).
The picture Vasco Araújo presents here has as its more direct reference Samuel Beckett's theatre play with the same title. That play, which is performed by a single actor, comprises a musical backing that provides a frame for the action taking place on the stage, a silent soliloquy in which speech takes the form of the expressiveness of the actor's body as it confronts the surrounding objects, going through a variety psychological moods. Instability, doubt, fear, amazement and a feeling of dejection and loneliness mingle together as an inner universe that returns us to our Sisyphean condition of reviving a state of permanent failure. In Vasco Araújo's work, the human condition is a constant vigil, concerned with the redemption of each one of us through otherness, through searching for the other, or others, that mirror themselves inside us contradictorily, somewhere between what we are and the shade of the one we long to become.   
The photograph Vasco Araújo has chosen for this project also contains a powerful contradiction. The space of the empty house, with its clean, ancient wooden floor, contrasts with the elegantly dressed man who looks at the light that comes from an hypothetical window. This man, who is barefoot, gazes intently at the world that displays itself beyond his loneliness, as his forsaken body lies on the chair, another form of monologue for that listless body, laid on the surface of an image that is almost as deep as a painting, while being at the same time as diaphanous as a thought that loses itself in the deafness of someone absorbed in listening to himself. The image represents a captured moment that perpetuates itself infinitely, as if something were on the verge of rushing against that man who lies cocooned in a cinematic, eternal melancholy.  
João Silvério
2013

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