{"id":484,"date":"2021-07-14T14:00:29","date_gmt":"2021-07-14T17:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ricardobarcellos.art.br\/en\/?page_id=484"},"modified":"2021-07-21T11:41:02","modified_gmt":"2021-07-21T14:41:02","slug":"texts","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ricardobarcellos.art.br\/en\/texts\/","title":{"rendered":"Texts"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tTHE IMAGE CASTS ON RETINA\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t<\/h3>\n\t\t

My father, Jo\u00e3o, was blind. Last time we were together, he asked me to take him to the living room so he could hear the wind blowing more closely. Then he asked me how many steps it would take to get across the street, what was between on side and another, and if there were curves on the way because he would need to make up a route to described images and others that remained in his memory. He could not stand that the description was polluted by “noise”. His eyes were hands for balance inside his private worldview. He has gone through more than five decades selecting a world of images where he could live and share space between his body, the couch, the armchair he listened to music, and the corners of the house. He always needed silence to understand what was before his eyes. Otherwise, noises of day could turn into matter (almost tactile) in that symbolic world. His life became the idea of an image from somebody else’s voice. When Ricardo Barcellos told me about The Blue Universe is a Booth two worlds match: my tumultuous outside world (visible\/carnal) and Jo\u00e3o\u2019s, interior, built from the words of those who were by his side. Anyone who believes that my world can produce more images than his is wrong.<\/p>\n

Barcellos came into the world of blind people trying to understand and “tolerate” the high volume of images that reach us every second like shadows.\u00a0 From a photographic repertoire, he proposes risk situations, challenging imagery and having a mental model as sensor that may overtake the third dimension. Who can sees what? Mass information should to be unveil so we can overcome chaos, said composer S\u00e9rgio S\u00e1, 63, congenitally blind, one interviewed for the project. That is the proposed filter: who will bear to see plenty and who needs information to build an immediate landscape? Paraconscious system takes something to a culture of vision. What is before our eyes: a cloud or a soap bubble?<\/em><\/p>\n

The Blue Universe is a Booth deals with encoded images. One: a table broken in pieces where each corner will touch the finger of a non-built vision. Two: horizons in the imagination\u2019s border: how is the blue? Do objects smell? Does color have a sound?\u00a0 How can we touch the skyline? Three: moon at the same time projected and diluted: inside a smoke\/cloud what will remain between what we can see and cosmic loneliness? Four: discovery of landscape at our fingertips. Imagination printed in 3D so relief wins digital photography: here touch will be the protagonist of thought\/vision. Five: inside a cube, passers-by appear and disappear between real and imaginary: \u201cThose who cannot see are able to notice body occupying a space. Those who can see notice body as if it was a moving image\u201d, claims the artist searching for a path between what is volatile and what may be perpetual. Six: panic of bombarded images. Author’s eyes try to understand the pain of others. Those who recover sight after blindness and succumb to a conflict between two extremes, which can result in depression and death.<\/p>\n

The Blue Universe is a Booth is an experiment involving words, matter, things and landscapes that try to balance in the limits of what is tangible and what is not anymore.\u00a0 Something like touching an object described by distance or trying to live with the “reality” of images cast on our retina.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Di\u00f3genes Moura<\/p>\n

Writer and Curator of Photography<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/article>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tEXCESSIVE\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t<\/h3>\n\t\t

There was a time when man saw the world as a combination of chaotic and violent forces that threatened his very existence. Unable to dominate them, he would turn to the possibility of experiencing extreme pleasure in abandoning himself to the unkind rituals dedicated to the god Dionysius. These forces had to be restrained by the good measures in the forms imposed by Apollo, so that a civilization process could be constituted and man could recognizes himself as a subject. In this effort to tame nature, tensions that continually haunt us were compressed.<\/p>\n

That is the way in which excesses reappear in the bosom of modern civilization as a supposedly inoffensive effect, produced by technique itself. The excesses that mark new rituals \u2013 now transformed into spectacles, such as here, in the case of body building or war games \u2013 do not appear to have compromised the power that man has conquered, seeing that they are the result of his autonomous will. They represent only an increment to the conquered order, but not its disturbance. Definitely ascertained as a plastic or playful effect, the excesses are converted into value: there is neither a limit nor sufficiency for that which a society cultivates as beautiful or pleasurable.<\/p>\n

Medicine is to the body of biology that which war is to the body of society: one and the other are interventions of culture over an organism in disarray. The analogy allows for an exchange of representations: war is justified as a bitter yet necessary remedy the same way as a medical treatment is thought of as a struggle against an enemy invader.<\/p>\n

A healthy body and the battle have always been of interest to poetry, to painting and to sculpturing. This esthetic approach, however, was not disassociated from a moral dimension: gymnastics was represented as a character-forming discipline, the same way as war was intended to be an instrument of civilization. \u00a0In this manner, both implied a certain ideal of justice. It is exactly when the body and war are reduced to a plastic and performing function that exaggeration becomes necessary: the excess of form is a manner in which to compensate the emptying-out of the psychological or social sense of the efforts expended.<\/p>\n

Body building, even when against the backdrop of a medical speech, remains a cosmetic activity which does not aim at the body\u2019s good functionality. On the contrary, this science is conducted in detriment to any notion of good health or organic efficiency. Its purpose is essentially to construct poses that allow the geometry of the muscles, already somewhat idealized by classic sculpturing, to be surpassed.<\/p>\n

Paintball now, is, in a certain sense, war in a literally pictorial version in which paint, and not blood, represents death. As a game, it is less an exercise in strategy – as is, for example, chess \u2013 than one in dramatization. If there is one convincing expression in these soldiers, it is because they reproduce through their acting, dressing and scenery an imaginary war constructed overall by the cinema.<\/p>\n

Even if we recognize archetypical traces in the performances that remain from the cult to the body or to war, what the practitioners seek is an effect which runs out in the present, in other words, in the presentation, the spectacle: it is therefore about a rite without a myth.<\/p>\n

The work shown in this exhibition is evidence that part of what we call reality already exists in itself as a pose, regardless if it has been placed in front of a camera. However, we must not take these scenes as something simply exotic and distant. They depict the outmost situation of an experience that crosses our everyday life: representation is and has always been an element that makes up our social reality and it is impossible to live within a culture without playing roles. This requires that the question be thought out beyond the Manichean notions of truth and lies.<\/p>\n

It is also evident to us that medicine demonstrates its efficiency in inventing a hybrid body, something between the normal and the artificial, with muscles, breasts, noses, skin but also with expressions, habits and behaviors that do little to translate our will or personality. In their turn, the gestures and vocabulary of war are assimilated in everyday study, work and social cohabitation relations. In an environment that makes competitiveness its main driving force any and all efficiency is measured in terms of the capacity to dominate an opponent. Therefore, the poses we see performed here in a hyperbolic manner are also part, in some manner, of the roles that are attributed to us.<\/p>\n

In the installation shown in the Central Gallery, we see the heavy bodies of two body builders, a man and a woman, paradoxically supported by light and translucent fabric. Thusly, these dense and dilated bodies are evidence of their condition as an image: that which body building works on and constructs is in fact, nothing more than a surface. The photographs are projected with the intervention of a hospital apparatus: the image is reflected by a liquid medium, in principle neutral and translucent, which does not appear to affect the final image. However the same medical substance that reflects these bodies from time to time also destabilizes them with the effect of the dripping that disturbs the reflecting surface. We then recognize the inconsistency of these solid bodies that have been elaborated in their appearance by technique and that are, at the same time, devoid of functionality as an organism. In its capacity for manipulation, science turns the body itself into a liquid existence, capable of assuming planned forms that are not very compatible with its own nature. The photographs that complement these projections and that occupy the Fidalga Space merely reaffirm by their fixed nature the dilution of this body into an image in which only a pictorial effect, but not that of a subject, remains.<\/p>\n

In the video that can also be found at the Fidalga Space, soldiers appear in a dark environment, first only as stains, later as camouflaged bodies in rigid, slowing movement, almost robotic. Sooner or later the mysterious and dramatic light, which adds tension to the performance, becomes insufficient to hide the artificiality of the pose, of the clothing and of the weapons. Yet the construction is quite realistic, not so much because we know about the reality of war, but because it corresponds to the treatment given the theme by the cinema, as we mentioned before. The video\u2019s screen is that which, according to our average experience, mostly resembles a battlefield. But here lies a disturbance of the space: seen from a vertical angle, this field is no longer the scenery and becomes a picture itself, as war does not exist in any other territory other than this body that depicts it as a game.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ronaldo Entler<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/article>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tRISK MEDIATIONS\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t<\/h3>\n\t\t

Ricardo Barcellos\u2019 work brings to light a possible meaning for photography in today\u2019s world as a reproduction, imitation and falsification of reality, using this medium as a hybrid language between documentation and new meanings of image introduced by the digital era.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

According to him: \u201cwe create an infinity of filters and interfaces that become \u2018protection networks\u2019 for our experiences. They are controlled risk strategies, or as the Americans say, they are meant to \u201cplay safe\u201d.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Through his a metalanguage effort, Ricardo constructs filters \u2013 which consist of a choice of his own images, scale, support and technical intervention \u2013 and with a certain irony, they emphasize reality.<\/span><\/p>\n

His strategy first travels through the \u201calluring\u201d packaging of the photography system, and then goes on to construct semblances of nature, establishing it as the greatest cultural invention, which makes him a mediator, producing images, objects, stories and situations.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These are simple appropriations whereby narration is constructed by the edition (choice), cut, and treatment and, in several cases, by joining independent and distant images.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI use this hybrid nature, generating images that hover on the fringe of fiction and reality, intertwining objective and subjective images, directly and indirectly (manipulated)\u201d states the artist.<\/span><\/p>\n

And \u201cFloresta\u201d falls within this experience, over-using scale to place us within the scenario. This photography presents a dense forest with several animals that bewilder us. From a distance they seem real but their co-existence raises suspicion.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ricardo cites Robert Smithson, who said that: \u201ccameras have something abominable about them because they have the power to invent many worlds\u201d, and furthermore: \u201cthis happens precisely to allow us to establish a dialectic relation between language and the physical world\u201d.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cArtif\u00edcios\u201d Ricardo purposely creates an explosion within the mist of dawn, near the Billings Reservoir in S\u00e3o Paulo. The result is a beautiful and playful image, assembled by the overlapping of two moments: the mist and the fireworks. The ensuing image puts us on the limit between fiction and the instantaneous photograph, in a sort of alchemy between the natural and the artificial.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cIcebergs\u201d(and in the other photographs) digital intervention raises suspicion. It is a personal recording of an ocean expedition to the Antarctic in 2011, aboard a schooner. Upon return, the artist resolves to \u201crecontextualize\u201d several images by manipulating colors.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Asserting that the issue here is not ecological discourse, and reaffirming its objective nature, the three images that make up this series are exhibited in small backlights which stress the their fetish-like advertising language. In this work he questions: \u201cwhat is real?\u201d.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the artist: \u201cWe have an inherent need for signs and images that generate a constant tension between the world and its projected imagery. It is the desire for an empty space, for that which is not given, for that which is hidden within a strange world that is neither reality nor fiction but rather a twilight zone which exists only inasmuch as there is a possibility or \u201csignificant coincidence\u201d.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This coincidence, found in \u201cDubai\u201d, is an image created in 2009 on a ski trail setting in a Shopping Mall where the temperature outside hit 113 degrees Fahrenheit; this strange artifice is revealed by a direct and objective photograph, framed as a post card lit by a cold and melancholic light.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the video, \u201cO filtro \u00e9 o Google\u201d (Google is the filter), the artist reveals in the title itself that this is an interface that accesses his desire. It is a virtual instrument that filters the author\u2019s consciousness. Sartre said that: \u201cUndoubtedly, it I who desires and desire is a singular mode of my subjectivity. Desire is consciousness as it can only exist as such (…)\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

In search of this consciousness, as a process of reflection, Barcellos navigates the search engine, seeking the \u201ckey words\u201d. From that time on, the chosen images are edited, printed, filmed and put into movement, and thus emerges a narrative game of possible associations which in the end never really happen, thwarting the understanding of the spectator, who is thrown into a labyrinth with no way out.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Exploring the hybrid potential of photography, Ricardo seeks to insinuate a fictional construction and proposes an enigma that is to be resolved by each person, based on his own repertoire.<\/span><\/p>\n

These \u201cevents\u201d, which are called \u201csignificative coincidences\u201d, hinge on the symbolic value we ascribe to them and, therefore, according to him, suggest that the reconciliation between image and the world remains nebulous\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Franz Manata<\/span><\/p>\n

Rio de Janeiro, September 2012<\/span><\/p>\n

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