09/15/2023
Pedro Oliveira Gallery
Inauguration Saturday 16.09.2023 - 16h
Wanderson Alves,
On the skin, the silence
"Wanderson Alves : Light and Memory"
There is a hand that touches lightly on one of the blinds through which light penetrates letting us see the outlines of the silhouette of someone peeking through a wedge of clarity, as if we were suddenly called into the enigma that the act of seeing power. To understand this riddle we have to reveal it in the way he hides itself, as in photography, which possesses an intense visual force that is not only imitating reality or representing the truth, but seeks above all to interact with the beauty of nature and with the concrete things of life that the photographer reveals in the most specific features, through his careful look. The well-known German art psychologist Rudolf Arnheim in a particularly interesting text titled On the Nature of Photography (Critical Inquiry, 1974) weaved a set of important considerations about the relationship of photography with technique, studio and the various models and codes that constitute the aesthetic mode of production from the photograph. According to Arnheim, there is a relationship of photography's non-spontaneous at its beginnings with its technical conditions. This must be, in his opinion, the fact that the equipment was too heavy to capture someone by surprise, since the exposure time was too long and therefore guess, according to him, that enviable timelessness of the first photographs.
This comes about the way the young Brazilian photographer Wanderson Alves masterfully explores in his latest work the sense of natural magnetism of the photographic image made of small events caught on camera, seeking to recreate an autofiction focused on landscape, memories of places and in the perceptions of ephemeral situations that suggest occasional experiences transformed later by photography into images that evoke both forgetfulness and death as well as the feeling of emptiness and sadness.
It is how Wanderson Alves captures the ceaseless action of a multitude of experiences that have been assimilated through consciousness, as if the photographer projected into the captured image the thread of a contemplative melancholy in order to reconstruct the marks left by time on what he felt. He has seen and testified.
In the photographs now exhibited at the Pedro Oliveira Gallery, Wanderson Alves explores, through a subtle game of twinkling and contrasts, the simultaneously ontological and aesthetic nature of the image that arises in both a twilight and romantic record as well as in a realistic and impressionist record linking, in both cases, to an atmosphere of astonishment that opens photography to a field of possibilities in which narratives of imagination and dream take a place of relief.
Carlos France
September 2023
