No matter how hard we try, the work of Francisco Tropa (b. Lisbon, 1968) cannot be presented through his guidance to a specific set of gestures, objects or concepts. Its nature is to be a broad field where different human experiences come together. An arena, an “arenarium” as the artist calls it, an open space where a body-to-body (real and virtual) takes place between the human and the art and which is the stage of the mystery — whose drama develops at least since Lascaux — which is constituted each time one of us faces a work of art and is faced by it.

The exhibition that gave rise to this book proposed, from a single work, to explore the work of this artist according to the idea of ​​images, their manufacture and their existence as real places. The work belongs to the Tropa lantern family and in this family axial ideas for the contemporary world are summoned. A world taken by the digital images that they carry within, and as their condition, devices of control, subjugation and power.

The almost primitive images that Tropa makes happen — and his images are always a kind of event — insistently refer back to the human body and are inscribed on its material plane of finitude. This plane from which the virtual images, purely spectral and disembodied, seem to be withdrawn. [Nuno Crespo]

Three eminent aspects of Francisco Tropa's work should be noted and can be seen in these Benjaminian passages.

First: its manifest and latent purpose is to erase the traces of any authorship and hinder any immediate interpretive happiness (although it cannot prevent it, of course).

Second: he too seeks “an appearance purified of beauty, free from all seduction”, he too knows he is subject to endless dissolution. The twilight, the hour between dog and wolf, the light of sunset reign in this abandoned theater of the world, Scenario or another title, with “its ruins deciphered”, without an interpreter.

Third: art is an interruption of endless dissolution, an unyielding form of delirium capable of immortalizing ruin. [Maria Filomena Molder]