We look and recall.
This is what happens to us when we visit this set of photos by Marcelo Greco: times are mixed.
Reminiscences of bygone times invade the present, insistently.
No matter how badly we may want to, we can’t shake off the representations that build upon the lived. They surge and intersperse our experiences.
The usual thing would be to see what you know, but sometimes other memories appear, haunting us, clouding our vision; so we can’t see what’s right in front of us.
They’re constantly making their presence felt, pursuing, hijacking the moment,
forcing us to doubt what we see:
-Is that really it?
-Am I seeing or remembering?
Place
It’s hard to believe in what is revealed as existing in these photos. What I see
defies comprehension.
There is always lack.
These are not dream images.
They have no stories to tell, though they bear
the mark of the past.
These images have no scars, though they harbor remembrances of the past;
selected forgotten contents.
I prefer to call them images to dream.
Which is quite different.
In fact, I don’t believe they want to belong
to ordinary existence:
What they offer is an unknown place.
They offer the unseen.
They do not give themselves up immediately, understanding is always delayed.
They are images of an unnamable land, a terrain
that cannot be recognized.
They contradict the notion of a single existence. They make us pursue
the unobtainable, and through this search, we produce fiction.
There is magic in this errancy, in this quest for meaning; looking
at these photos, we glimpse the chance of dabbling in the eye of the other.
Art allows us to write identity in the plural:
we learn that, sometimes, one has to be another just to be oneself.
It makes me want to lie.
Lie to have a destination, lie to have a future.
I remember reading that “the dancer is not so much the one who kicks up the dust as the one who invents his own floor” (Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen).
Taken together, these images create a place.
The temporality in these pictures is not that of occurrences,
the elements that comprise them are there to announce the ambiguous.
The game they propose is to sustain the enigma.
The shadows
So here’s the game: discover the thoughts the shadows keep, plumb
the evidence of the visible.
Sometimes I have the sensation that I’m seeing something,
but I end up losing myself in the understanding, my eyes get lost
in what they could have discerned.
It so happens that that’s where we roam.
We roam amongst much that we know, in an incredible vastness.
We find no similarities.
In the darkness of shadows there are messages that lie halfway
between perception and thought.
They, the shadows, prove visible to all who pay enough attention.
They are shadows so intense, so dense, that the lights that shine near them
gain in drama and power.
The resulting colors seem to shimmer with despair.
The colors
The pictures, specifically these pictures, take us to a place where we work
with abstractions.
If this place is exile, luckily it is one that allows for return.
We return with those images, with memories, imbued with colors,
with enchantment.
What illuminates this place are nocturnal lights.
Lights that build restless dreams; dreams that change the operations
of thought.
