The Opposite of Everything
Sombras Secas (Dry Shadows) is the second skin of the city, its passers-by and through, its flying objects, its transparencies, vestiges of humanities, the imminence of thought, the grime trickling down a window pane, the photographer’s hesitation between what he really sees, what he is, and what he is trying to discover so he can finally become self-aware. It’s an internal playhouse of representations; it can’t be explained, only seen. No photograph is open to interpretation. Not here, among the dry shadows where Marcelo Greco’s pictures are part of a laboratory in which we sometimes get the feeling their silence (of life and death) is being challenged.
Theirs is a darkened, inebriating world in which we are driven to get to the bottom of the process hidden within each photo, and which exist precisely because they “hide”. The photographer is the opposite: he turns himself in to avoid being skinned alive by the image, like a lost love peeling itself unstuck. Which is left behind? Which does the leaving? The same thing, twice, shadows reproducing the same man, who very often doesn’t notice he’s being followed over steadily draining time. So the cards are dealt. The trigger pulled. No metaphors drape the window onto tomorrow.
No veils. No masks. Just a subject trying to make its way home through the sleeping city: an inner place where everything is an urgent matter. We are in coma. No city will ever be revealed in here. Everything is a mere matter of seconds. We forget representation. We’re in a vast theater, with its iron wounds. The photographer is the opposite: he turns himself in to avoid being skinned alive by the image. Once again, a tremendous passion. On the other side of the curtain, cracks run through the glass. Whom amongst us will press a cheek against the mirror? In the empty space between humanities, man and the city flicker in the darkness that will never be revealed. The photographer is the opposite.
Diógenes Moura
