David Barro /// Conversation with João Tabarra

“A film comedy is assembled with the same precision as the inner workings of a watch” Buster Keaton

André Gide pointed out: “Everything has been stated, but as no one listens we have to keep on going back and starting over again”. But the truth is that I don’t find it hard to insist on João Tabarra, an artist about whom I confess I am convinced. João Tabarra belongs to the small group of artists who feel that an artist is like a long distance runner. Thus, having mastered the field of photography, he broke away from it in order to gain distance, in order to make viable a critical discourse that today has expanded to his videos and which allows him to question, before anything else, the image at a time when its profusion might be seen as an iconoclastic symptom. But also because beneath that critical irony hiding a political sense of life there is a certain faith or belief in individual power to change things, or, I might dare state, to stop them getting worse.