they were love lying
TRANSCRIPT
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Carlos Lobo | João Leal
Sem título=Untitled
They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn't know where to look. (George
Seferis)
The eyes, which are called the window of the soul, are the main way through
which the centre of the senses or common sense can gaze more widely at the
endless and wonderful works of Nature; the ears are the second sense which is
exalted by listening to the account of the things that the eyes have seen.
(Leonardo da Vinci)
To see is like looking, the perfect natural combination of the five senses;
however, in seeing, this same harmony is one of reflected wisdom. Therefore,
to look first precedes seeing and then follows it whereas seeing first follows
looking and then immediately precedes it.(Almada Negreiros)
To Look, To See & The Image:
It is a question of looking, of knowing to look in order to see, to
perceive . The look will be, par excellence, this immanent “seeing”; it will
mean the Light, postulating Knowledge.
The question is knowing where to look. Because there is a necessary
diversity of ways of looking : “the look of the other” (Jean-Paul Sartre),
“the look of the traveller” (Sérgio Cardoso), “the look of the stroller”(Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin…), “the look of the wanderer”(Herman
Hesse), “the look of the stranger” (Nelson Brissac Peixoto), “the look
that leads nowhere” (Rainer Marie Rilke), “the errant look” (Bruce
Chatwin), “the look of the soul”, “the symbolic look”, “the mythical look”,
“the unseeing look”, “the reflected look”, “the look of the utopian”, “the
hermetic look” and even “the look of the serpent”… - safeguarding,
however, the difference in the epistemological order manifest in this
incomplete catalogue.
The completeness of so many “looks” contends for the gestation, thewidest known diversity of images: hypnagogic and hypnamorphic, hypnic
images, hallucinatory images, images by perceptive isolation, rhythmic
stimulation images, consecutive images, eidetic images … We should also
note: memory images, evocative images, imagined images, mental images
… (Michel Zéraffa).
Thus, it is possible to form, with clarity, some phantasmic aesthetic
portion versus right authorial deliberation:
Images of a scene from personal life; Conceptual images of an object; Images//historical event; Images//more general evocation (e.g. of a
concept), … amongst others susceptible of photographic andvideographic production. We should remember, without passing
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judgment, the (in)conclusive distinction between the fixed and moving
image. The referential and/or elaborative functions also add to richness
and complexity with a view to the never-exhaustive theorisation on the
image and its typologies …operationalities and realisations.
True, neither the anatomic-physiological nor the purely psycho-
physiological look are sufficient, however convenient; to look is reason
and body. Both the visible and the invisible. The condition of being
visible, a right and a duty of Nature toward Man, requires man to exist;
the invisible, let us state like Merleau-Ponty, requires the condition of
becoming, not simply the invisible being the non-visible: "...what has beenor will be seen and is not, or is seen by someone other than me (but not by me),but where its absence counts in the world (it is "behind" the visible, imminent oreminent visibility, it is Urpraesentiert exactly like Nichturpräsentiertbar, likeanother dimension) where the gap that marks its place is a point of passage inthe "world". (Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible , Paris, Gallimard, 1964)
Conclusion:To see: to look at things >>> to see things;
To see: to look at others >>> to see others;
To see: to look at the world >>> to see in the world;
To see: to look at oneself >>> TO SEE oneself.
Landscape, Architecture & Objects:
There is a prime common denominator between the landscape,
architecture and objects – among so many others to be mentioned – that
is, precisely, intentionality. Intentionality is the inseparable theme; it is
the integral condition of the subject that decided to capture something(etwas ) for the photograph.
The intentionality underlying the photographic decision carries analogies
with the intentionality that guides any act of volition in favour of
production. The distinction will lie in what is designated as fragmentary
intentionality that possesses an aesthetic effectiveness. Even though we
always find, in other types of images, externalised through different
registers, a decision directed at the capture of a fragment of the visible,
in photography it reveals itself genuinely constitutive, substantial and
final.“These are fragments of impulsive or compulsive, or more simply pulsive,spontaneous, images, of a second or two, through which time precedes itself inthe invisible.” (Pascal Quignard, Sur le Jadis , Paris, Gallimard, 2002)The attention devoted to reality transforms both allusive representations
and tight presentifications, in fragments of a scrupulous or removed
documentation (always having the function of representing/presenting a
picture or creating detachment).
The decision about the affirmative fragment can derive from essential
and dissimilar residues.In a first moment, it derives from visual perception.
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In a second moment, it reincarnates the mental ability to elaborate from
this same visual perception, approaching it, moving away from it,
protecting it, distorting it and finally …making use of it as a unity and a
whole.
In a third moment, the previous options are recognised as we discover
that they are mirrored in the procedures required for its realisation.
The sanctioned object, the fruit of the seen and the looked, reconciles
itself in the individual, converging towards knowledge, perhaps differing
in the moment when either action occurs in the individual/subject who
experiences it.
The photographic product implies therefore endless and interacting
elements, with particular relevance to some binomials assumed by the
subject/author directed at the subject/viewer (the public):
• Continuity versus discontinuity in the justified elements;
• Technical specialisation versus iconographic specificity;
• Presentification versus gnoseologic interpretation;
• Isolation versus convergence of visual signs and/or objects;
• Construction versus (aggregated) conceptual destruction;
• Technological accuracy versus creative intuition…
The author’s intentionality estimates the distinction, the almost unique
conditions that one wishes to expand. The factors governing the decision
on the identitarian fragment of the photographic image explain through
multiple strategies the desired iconographic and/or iconological
solutions: they promote tendencies, affinities and invoke referentiations
or contexts.
The distinctive, the differentiable, ensure a certain detachment from the
world even though they can never remove themselves from it for it is
unquestionable and constitutive. On the other hand, they guarantee its
availability for the decision to ignore, transfigure or recount it to be
made …“In this world, things are simultaneously available for use and according to theirmanifestation. (…) It is what does not show itself but gathers in itself, thestrength mustered before or beyond forms, but not as another obscure form: asthe other of forms.” (Jean-Luc Nancy, Au fond des images , Paris, Galilée, 2003)Thought intervenes in the destined image. It confers on it adjacent
charges, aesthetic properties and added values: realising, imagining
dominance; visible or unveiling resulting intimacies that have a common
conscience in the public that perceives them. This does not dissolve the
ability to justify objectiveness if that is the instance preferred.
Photographic images and other external images can be falsifications of
the eye. We grant them this right. Even though it should be noted that
seeing, looking, may be directed by passion, by emotion, these are
associated, become accomplices in a reflexive exercise that bestowsdensity and truth on them (as autonomous and discriminated images).
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The deformation granted them by fragmentary (and ontic) intentionality
does not cancel the imagetic accuracy or clarity: this is another order,
the phenomenological order, because it is aesthetic, although we can
question identification, recognition or agreement with stricter cognitive
topics: “I do not understand what I saw. And I do not even know whether I saw itfor my eyes ended up by not being different from the seen thing.” (ClariceLispector, A Paixão segundo G.H., Lisboa, Relógio d’Água, 2000)
Landscape:
Landscape began by being defined since the remotest times of Art
historiography, dating back to Greece and Rome, and progressing from
then on with invalidations, interstices and dominances. It reigned or
abdicated, gliding on with the rules of taste or with ontological reasons,
and claimed reinvigorated appropriations as photography took it on.
Landscape is alive in the 21st Century.
If landscape is an interpretative art, when it is photographed is it doubly
so?
Landscape occupies a territory; it is localised and represents a portion of
reality that can be apprehended.
As territory, landscape is conventionally defined, referring to the
delimitation of a surface through natural or cultural contours that are
decision objects. The lines that govern these contours are baroque and
extend an almost paradoxical meaning because the fixing of limits
interacts with the open sinuosity of curvatures and bordering near-labyrinths.
Localisation is demonstrated by resorting to the definition of reference
axes; it is established by administrative procedures; it is fixed in plans
and maps that are filled in by partial images, taken from diverse angles
and perspectives, all complementary and necessary – Back to Zero.
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The portion of reality in question results from two previous topics and is
decided by the intentionalised will of those who address and desire it. It
is the singular “place”, the endless sum of places that gain iconographic
identity and aesthetic autonomy. A supposed aesthetic of the place: as a
portion, as a fragment.
Fragments combine isolated components of reality meant for
discernment, becoming visual worlds touched by personal fabrication.
Apparently the opposite corresponds to the definition of “panorama”.
Panorama is a continuous narrative of the painted scene or landscape,
conforming to a flat or curved surface that unfolds or enfolds the viewer:“But your eyes proclaim/ That all is surface. Surface is what is there/And nothingcan exist except what is there.” (John Ashbery, Auto-retrato num espelho convexo e outros poemas , Lisboa, Relógio d’Água, 1995) It is a fluid surface, in the horizontality that the infinite perhaps earns
from us. It conforms to a linearity that oscillates between parallel lines
and/or lines that tend to converge to a virtual and distant vanishing point.
They can be ascending or descending, being transported to positive or
negative, hence bipolar, mythologies. However, they presuppose an
almost pictorial as much as geometric levelling – Endless.
Poetically, they would be bands of views nurtured by visual perception
that wants to bestow longevity and matter on them. They are filled in by
natural or environmental, visceral or constructed substances.
Architecture(s) & Objects:
The imaginary sets – Imaginary film sets - for some filmproductions stipulate directed gazes that want to see and focus on
specific factors, on structures designated by a deliberately captured
visuality.
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Architecture always has an exterior and an interior, as the human body.
which is inside and outside, being one.
On the other hand, architectures have a history. They belong to
generations that perpetuate them thanks to their functionality and
inhabitability or dissolve them by damage and neglect. They are the
symbolic empty houses that are not necessarily homes… They are
embodied structures that can be filled in with unsuspected products and
materials.
Tarmac roads, urban layouts, lead to the seeds of architecture, they
legitimise them and make access to them possible. Roads are lines, all
things are lines as Álvaro de Campos knew that all things are symbols or
maybe nothing. Symbols can be neglected objects, can be intentional
debris or obstacles whose attributes deflagrate in social and ideological
connotations. These objectual traces are signs, allegories or metaphors
according to their use, to the pragmatics decided for them.
In these spaces where the architectural function is predominant, human
tracks almost dissolve, so imperceptible are they. It is almost as if theyhad not existed …
In Imaginary film sets photographic images appear in a post-conceptual
time/space (by reference to German photographic tradition), regenerating
aesthetical values and adding different semantic dimensions to them.
Similarly to what happens with the landscape, there are proximity and
detachment factors that organise differentiated visual perceptions (and
the others).
The architectural sets shown in the images are a construction of a
construction: a double or triple conceptualisation since their matricity
comes as a sequence of the line (the drawing as matrix) and returns to
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the stipulation of lines, contours, chromatic fill-ins… substantive
morphologies bi-dimensionalised in the photographs.
Photography consists of, has this identitarian and essential note that is
recognised in drawing when this is assumed as a requirement and
postulation of the author’s body: “Where we see that drawing is a physicalprocess./ Because we only begin to understand it when we have practised it alot./(…)/ I discovered that drawing was not only to look at, but also to touch.”(Jan Fabre, Umbraculum , Paris, Actes du Sud, 2001)
Maybe “Images are words that failed us.” (Manoel de Barros, “Retrato Quase Apagado em que se Pode Ver Perfeitamente
Nada”)
Maria de Fátima Lambert
(Coordinator Teacher, Curator and Critic)