Whether wittingly or not, showing or hiding whether he wants to or not, Pedro Portugal disdainfully points out an art made up of quotations, of mechanization, of mass vulgarization, yet living off that same constitutional logic, in the sense that he organizes his own art within it; further still, exacerbating the process to the point of it not being possible to know where lie the beginning and end of intentions, desire, yielding, critique, adhesion, profit or giving up.

On the threshhold of these movements, he searches for a meaning for what he does within the difficulty of the very idea of searching for a meaning. The incommunicability of all the pathways of individual research, principally for someone who is aware of the most generalized disinformation, insensitivity and aesthetical lack of culture, lead to a type of giving up of meaning, to a cynical skepticism, to a type of indifference announced in the work itself, in the manner of making it appear.

Now referring to his work, the strategy of amalgamating pictorical quotations (known motifs of other artists), requires a process of research and selection which on this occasion he delegated to two students in the Ar.Co, Art and Communication School - using their own taste and criteria they would make an inventory of some, and let the supposed artistic pretension of the observers be forgotten, because, if in earlier works it was still possible to identify some elements, now not even the artist himself would know them very well or be able to clarify them. Because in fact, in favour of the artist or against him, in spite of the public or because of it, original or copy, one image or another, it makes no difference.

The composition of the matrixes is done by computer before the painting; the previous digitalization makes its manipulation, inventory making and circulation easier. Painting is a technical whim, which is boring and can be entrusted to a good assistant; finding the forms, ditto. The very decision to quote and reproduce as an appropriation, after Warhol, Sherri Levine and all the post-modern manifesto is also a philosophical accommodation. Because in fact, it might be possible to prove, using all the same arguments of the post-modern, that everything remains to be invented.

There remains compulsion, daring and survival. The compulsion to be an artist, not always coinciding with that of making art. The impudence throw a work into the nothingness of signification or into the simulation of this emptiness, or into the simulation of this simulation...without making clear which is the first deforming mirror. Survival, because on the threshhold of giving up, this is not totally possible.

"Last Paintings" because they are the last that he intends to do, or simply because they are the last ones he has done? The intentional ambiguity of the designation has once more to do with an unaccepted ending, because the end, the definitive death or the passage of death is, in any case, an unknown risk which is not easily taken.

The works in this "exhibition" could have been displayed in their physical plenitude (canvasses and paint). Instead they are presented in two virtual spaces: the first is on the Internet, where one may find the matrixes of the "Last Paintings", a "Shop", and a Portfolio of the artist. Pedro Portugal can thus reach the whole planet, and it is this very sensation of ubiquitousness, another space/time in accelerated distortion and manipulation, that the recourse to computers foreshadows. The second space is the screen in the room in which these "works" cannot be reduced, have been kept in the studio waiting for the effect of the ordering catalogue in these two virtual spaces of his painting, more virtual even than any usual catalogue or portfolio may be on another level. In this way we arrive at another possible approach to Pedro Portugal's work, that of wanting to laugh at the consumer, at commerce, and at decorative greed. Starting from the same matrix, several canvases and repeated drawings are made in various sizes so that no corner of a room or corridor exist for them to fit in. Concepts of management and marketing form the very explanation of the "concept" of the exhibition. And as to the paintings, should one mention their festive, ludical, chromatic or fantasious appearance? Or pass over these minor aspects?

The virtual image comes from the accepting that the real image contains nothing essential, no internal movement, raison d'Étre, presence; it is like stating its inexistence, its emptying in favour of an appearance, a projection, a simulacrum, and therefore an uprooting. And if the exuberance of the image may be the faìade of its great internal void, the staging of the void can also point out an enormity of questions in a type of eternal returning of signification, or at least of an initial motivation which befalls all denials and simulacra.

The fact that the artist has himself taken on the total production of the exhibition seems to show this crossing of a critical tendency in relation to the social circuits (of art and others) which has been a constant in is work, with this pseudo-naòve discussion of single probable intention, origin and finality of the works.

Pedro Portugal’s work is that of a gigantic dismounting which is difficult to restructure.

As an also pseudo-casual option, as one language or another make no difference and W or K, it doesn't matter, one could say as to make initials of the title phrase: "When We Walk around and Watch the World We Wonder Why the World Wide Web Would be so Wonderful".