Horizontes brancos
Horizontes brancos #01 > #06, 2018, inkjet print on fineart cotton paper, 100×150 cm.
Edition of 3+1 artist’s proof
(…) These are domestic pictures that belong to a family album, and now survive as ghosts coming from an undefined time and a place, ostensibly showing their posthumous condition. They request us to fill the blank spaces of “when”, “where”, and “who”: who are those people? In which circumstances, what time, were they photographed?
This is just the first signification level. (…) But there is another signification level, a more important one, and that is where we should apprehend what’s more fundamental in this work. That level is the one where we subtract the documental and historic condition to these images. In this case, the artist is not just the mediator, nor he reverences the images in his file. In a certain way, he desecrates, exercising on them a manipulation that deviates them from its original place.
This manipulation has two dimensions: through digitalization and enlargement, the images acquire new plastic qualities, close to an artistic discipline which is not photography anymore. There is a nullification of the photographic effect, to the point when the spectator feels like there is no more need to ask: who, when, where?
(…)Here, the media don’t have the transparency quality, they don’t turn off to show the mediator images and sounds. On the contrary, they have a special opacity (…) the machines and the technical devices are integrating part of this work, they become equivalent elements to the pictures. They are the factor for the annulation of the documental effect. And so, the images move forward to an enigmatic place, where their phantasm-like condition is revealed.
António Guerreiro
excerpt from the text “SUMMON THE IMAGES, REVEAL THE GHOSTS”
exhibitions: