bio

Paulo B. Menezes bio

Born in Portugal in 1976, Paulo became interested in arts in childhood, particularly in cinema, which would lead him to enroll in Film Studies at the Portuguese national film-school, Escola Superior de Teatro & Cinema where he would obtain a bachelor degree in editing and narrative. In 2002 he founded the electronic and electroacustic music label Plancton Music.

In 2004, he initiated studies himself in experimental cinema and video art, areas he began studying and working on regularly by creating videos that explore different possibilities as in ‘Falling light’, selected for the Portuguese representation in the DVD PROJECT – video art itinerant exhibition — in 2008 and, in 2009, as one of six Portuguese pieces representing the country at the ‘Contemplaciones’ exhibition in the LOOP International Festival Fair for Video Art, Barcelona, Spain.

In 2007, after using editing in an expressive free-association way with both original and appropriated footage, he started a series of minimalist pieces in which editing was used structurally rather than expressively, discarding harmony (when not sound altogether) in a shift towards abstraction as indicated by a growing inclination to think of video as modern (moving) painting rather than film, as in ‘Cloud (My emotions flow sideways like crabs)’, ‘Synthetic Interior Garden’ installation, ‘ ‘My 9094 CTL’ (distorted landscape)’ and ‘Futuro Imperfeito’, a number of which were included in international exhibitions at art galleries and film festivals in countries like Great-Britain, Spain, Germany, Portugal, The Netherlands, Mexico, Peru, France, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, China and Italy, among others.

In 2015 he produced and directed ‘O último guerreiro romântico’, a piece commissioned for theatre later presented in Teatro do Bairro, as well as being subject of a 10 years video art retrospective at Adamastor Studios art gallery.

In 2016, he made the video art piece ‘She got the idea’, a piece that reflects the relation between femininity and the feminine gaze later exhibited in Italy, France, Spain, Argentina, Portugal and Mexico. At that same year he directed and curated the Lisbon videoart and experimental cinema international exhibition ‘Oblíqua’ creating the first Portuguese anthology ever and featuring experimental work from 7 countries, and several other Portuguese programs for international exhibitions.

That same year, he finished the experimental cinema ‘O que a Noite rouba ao Dia’, produced with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, premiered at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, film that would later win the Maracay International Film & Video Festival (Venezuela) the prize for the Best Experimental Fiction Feature.