“As an interdisciplinary artist Fontinha moves across his mediums like an actor across the stage. The performative quality within his work effectively draws the viewer into the moment being portrayed, and leaves them reeling from the energy and physicality of the experience.”
JOSEPH FONTINHA
“It is this process of video to still image to animation and back that
has really defined my interdisciplinary approach to the work.”
The Birds
This was a project that was a part of a series I called “Breaking a Legend.’ It was a series of homages to great performers/artists. In this piece, I broke down a sequence from Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” an attack scene. Surprisingly there were very few props once unpacked, just a lot of frenzied but quality acting. A side interest of mine has always been the connection between people and language as it relates to the visual. For this series of images that I recreated from the Hitchcock masterpiece, I had an assistant pose my body using the image sequence as reference, one that I could not see. It required a significant amount of listening, collaborating, even negotiating. At this time, I also started hand drawing and painting into printed versions of my animations, and here I used traditional drawing tools to accentuate the energy and the desperation of the moment. It is this process of video to still image to animation and back that has really defined my interdisciplinary approach to the work.
Tennis Lesson & Facestep
My whole family plays tennis, and I admire it for a lot of the same reasons I love making art. At times, you are just working on your form, and then when that moment comes, you rely on muscle memory and just feel your way through it. I have long been interested in industrial color, like that delicious green of the tennis ball, and the idea of limiting myself to an object is exhilarating, it is fetishization but really satire, it is simple but very conceptual. It stands in contrast to Facestep which is just about paint, and trust, and truth - but in both cases the work is about my story, my place; and I spend a lot of time trying to connect them to larger, more human ones.
Waterfall
I spent much of February participating in a daily collage challenge, and all three of these works are from that collection. I wanted my collage work to have a video component, one that had the feel of paper, but moving. The idea of something still and something moving is one of the pillars of my work. I shot the raw video in the morning, printed it in sequence, created a sculptural paper version for re-photographing, and performed it while the back animation of the waterfall was being flipped simultaneously but at twice the rate of speed. It is a lot how you would layer a painting from back to front- painting is where I started my artistic journey, and it always informs and stabilizes my studio practice. This piece had some performance, a lot of digital imaging, some basic flipbook techniques, painting, and collage-based animation. Completing a piece like this and all of it’s components in a day really keeps me engaged in the work.
ABOUT JOSEPH FONTINHA
Joseph Fontinha’s work invites viewers to partake in pregnant moments, as a respite from the frenzied nature of contemporary visual culture. He insists we slow down enough to contemplate and seek understanding through the perspective of his installations and paintings. Fontinha is very intentional about conveying truths he feels can only be communicated through oil paint. He attributes much of his inspiration to annual trips to Nagano, Japan, where he’s visited family for the past 12 years.
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, MA, Boston University, MA, and Lesley University College of Art and Design, MA, fostered Fontinha’s formal artistic education. He now teaches drawing and painting at Stoughton High School and gives public artist talks on education. Fontinha has participated in juried solo exhibits and group shows through the Cambridge Art Association and Boston University. In 2017 he produced an immersive solo pop-up installation, Making a Painting, at Fountain Street Gallery.