REFLECTION #1 [back]
EXTENSIONS (1990 - 1991)
1. We live in a time which is more and more permeable to unconditioned exprimentation of all types of social and behavioural schemes which in their essence reflect a general attitude of ideological and cultural uprooting: at the same time, we observe the extreme functionality of systems and nomrs which, for the degree of rationalisation and performance accomplished, bring the individual closer to an ethical and political feeling which favours the acceptance of "consensi" which are based on communitarian principles and ideals which presuppose the logic of an enlarged "sensus comunis".
From visual acceleration to the construction of complex artifial objects, the mental and creative trans-figuration of today's artist is thus reborn in a context of values, which are in some cases, atypical, and in others, are charged with a neofunctional and communicative force, combining in both cases scattered and purposeless languages, if one excludes that common harmony of the work of art which consists of the simple and virtuous will both man and artist to cast a brief but exalted glance over the world and over life.
2. What this series of photographs reveals is the confrontation of registers between the human logic perceptive intuition, founded on anthropological decentralisation and on a primitive dynamic of reality, as well as the vertiginous passage of this reality onto to a plane of representation which is structured on various effects (the case of simulation and anamorphosis); these essentially signal the trasitoriness, the narrative instability and the visual saturation point which the (dis)integration of the image reveals when it is ontologically returned to it's condition of pure duality where one sees the ambivalence between the statude of the copy and the original as an operational factor of emission/reception of the message contextualised by the spatio-temporal form of communication.
3. In these works, the syntax of the photographic image is made explicit by the artist as if it were a visual syntagm, which is based on the extension of signs which were extracted, moulded and computerised afterwards, from reality; this works as a kind of resonance box between the various degrees of filtration which the image evokes as an aesthetically projected object on the computer's screen.
4. One might ponder upon the final result of all these images, by reffering to the American writer of scientific fiction Philip Dick, who posed, by the way of time and it's understanding through the respective reproductive mechanisms, the somewhat unusual question: "When you play a record for the second time, do the musicians play for the secod time too?". What some of these photographs suggest is exactly this internal resonant and perceptive side of their incubation, the engendering of the real and it's computerised multiple passed onto the screen, which works as a dark chamber, an electronic, computerised and digital laboratory of a fictitious and factitious construction such as Aristotle's potentiality and act, or rather, in technological terms, the input and the output.
5. A final remark, although it does not bring about any conclusions, is that Júlio de Matos. presents in these works, in a markedly experimental way, a series of photographs which are solidly designed on the basis of the manipulation of sophisticated technologies to which he has already accustomed us for some years.
One's attention should therefore be drawn to an important nucleus of the images which reveal in this exhibition a complex depersonalisation which express itself organically both in the optical pulsion of the dislocations suggested from the rectangular shape of the image and in the analytical (de)focusing force to which the artist submitted the whole chromatic apparatus which covers the tonal surface of each photo. EXTENSIONS, the title of this exhibition, is really a cool universe, though designed and formalised from a scenery copied from a lively and popular reality, as is the case of carnivals or festivals where a panoply of objects and images of a rural, heraldic or religious type are melted into the original matrix of this work.
We should look at all this with the sceptical and romantic attitude of one who conceives the solitary fiction of reality as an exceptional space where these are no longer heroes or pedestals, but rather a fire of colours and shadowless things.
Carlos França (Art Critic)
Belmonte, 1991
Note: Text from the exhibition catalogue.