Biography

Matter, architecture and drift.

[Some notes around a photographic series by Francisco Vasconcelos]

"This is the image outside the time and space he wanted now, he was not sure how that would be achieved, but he was determined to succeed"

Italo Calvino, I Racconti

In a tale he called "The Adventure of a Photographer," Calvino describes the fictional account of an artist he dubbed a philosopher-skeptic, a character who is confronted with the popularity, meaning, and purpose of the photographic medium. The obsessive desire to portray everyday life realizes that the object of desire for its lens rests, in the end, on the disappearance of that same object. That is, we never position ourselves in the "real" presence of the photographed object, because between reality and the image there is an ontological impossibility that is determined by the construction of representation and art.

It is here that, I believe, we can verify the series of photographic works of Francisco Vasconcelos that he called decisively Multiverse. In fact, the concept of the meta-universe proposed by physics as a hypothetical set of multiple chained universes characterized by the notion of space, time, matter, and energy, as well as the laws of physics and their variants, delimit an arc program in Vasconcelos' work that seems to redirect the look of a photographic project that presents itself through a double proposition: on the one hand, to question the medium of photography still as a solid and effusive testimony of the fabric of Euclidean reality in its understanding of the form and of apparent space, in an oscillating ideology between presence and absence; On the other hand, and here his work is poignant, using the simple technique of multiple exposure opens the way to a number of possibilities from which he aspires to "create" new forms and visions of the truth and consistency of what the lens can not fail to capture.

It is as if Vasconcelos was rescued from the very record of photography - and therefore from the freezing of things that he sees and experiences - the possibility of this becoming a double origin, instituting a set of images that define an assumed position in which the reality that surrounding us can be measured in its completeness. For this, the artist presents a series of works in which he defines multiple points of view, kaleidoscopic visions of the world (we see water, trees, buildings, asphalt) that interconnect in an intermediate sense, something between the real and the fractal, always showing visions the natural and human presence through the construction in architecture where the delimitation and the contour of the objects are reconstructed from their arbitrary existence, points of composition and pressure that Vasconcelos balances with rigor and a work of intense production.

Paradoxically, it is with the possibility of double exposure and discontinuity of this initial matrix that this series of photographs intends to reconstitute an original flow that has been used in the world, giving us, as observers, a shattered vision, but because it is chipped, inventive, restoring the act of seeing, or as Walter Benjamin correctly wrote: "achieving purity of look is not difficult, it is impossible."

by HUGO BARATA
VISUAL ARTIST / CURATORIAL PROJECTS / CULTURAL MEDIATOR