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The voluminousity of matter

Once again it starts. And for what reason? What do the photographic images of Teixeira Barbosa bring us that is new? And what restarts on them? In this photos it seems that the sculptor, once embracing the ductility of shapes, now runs his fingers through the voluminousity of matter. This is the first novelty. And it's also a strong contradiction in principle.

Voluminousity combines, precisely, the amount of volume and lightness, making itself the qualitative attribute of a sensory experience that confounds and transforms it. There is something luminous in the experience of volume that affects and alters the trivial perception of the sculptural form. Light is carved through volume, by its intensity, by the tangible sensory fluctuation where textures, colours and the strong suggestion component in eyesight are inscribed. Luminosity does not consist in the distribution of shine or the appearance of colour, or the carnality of sculpture, but in building the diaphanous experience of the aura, of the atmosphere, that animates its space and reception.

Sculpture was never a volume cut by the simple formal game of shadows. In reality, sculpture casts them, mingling them in their touch of surfaces with the translucency and colour of matters. In a sense, it captures the movement of its own effects, becoming as solid and unexpected as its own folds and shadows.

Sculpture begins again when the memory of its images and the reactivation of its emotions are at stake. In Sculpture, surfaces can be modest volumes and volumes, little more than surfaces. Opaque materials may shine and reflect, while transparent ones may double and unfold space. The contact zone becomes, as such, extensive and intensive. If visual inference privileges the tactile, spacial experience becomes a frontier of distances and of emotion of vision.

Sculpture is then able to become a photographic hypothesis, a paused and long lasting resource of the photographic instance, in whose series eye movement and the choreographic projection of space are reconstituted. This is another innovation, subsequent to the first one, but essential for photography includes the game of contractions and constraints of the sculptural matter - that institutes, apart from spacial determinations, the paradox of life suspended in a passing instant. A connection, therefore, between shape and time, between intensity and duration.

In sculpture matter, volume, weight give impulse to a technical decision that, as in the classical art of subtraction - arte di levare - prefers to choose the contact and mobility of plans as well as the subtlety of the colour they create. As such, if photography denies the perception of sculpture's traditional space it gives back the eye the ability of imagining it in the plenitude of its sculptural force. And what is this force? The mold and molding are the attitudes, the techniques that are most convenient to the forming of the sculptoric object. In the opposite corner of the ideal uncovering processes, via subtraction, mold and molding point to archaic production processes of form by contact. The constructive logic of the contact-image thus implies a process of interposing the expressive media and materials. It implies a dynamic evocative of the form and the forces that make it.

What is at stake in contact-sculpture is not, therefore, an idea of shape, but the movement and live antithesis of a presence, presence that includes the immediate and expressive incorporation of absence, the real combination of space and time polarities, of aspects of both acting and making. In this sense, the photographic medium contact materializes the expressivity of these polarities, made real in the serial succession of its light modeling and modulating.

What are the consequences of contact-sculpture in photography? It's about interpreting in this kind of images a phenomena of intensification of shape and time, of integrating expressive rhythms and memories. The meeting and chance relations with things with the chaotic appearance of reality, with antagonistic places - the painter's studio, main theme of these photographs - aspire in fact to the voluminousity of the contact-image. The photographic medium is just a technical subterfuge capable of capturing the the relationship between the appearance of volume and the presence of light. So it is neither virtuality nor virtuosism what imposes itself in this photographs, but the dialectics of form and movement, object and space. This dialectics is impregnated with relations and distinctions between sculpture and photography, but also between sculpture and painting, and yet, between painting and photography.

In reality, if sculpture carries in itself the graveness and solemnity of the monument, photography, on the contrary, tries to capture a face, an aspect of its inner presence and memory. Therefore, volume and luminosity coincide in one thing: life, shapes, the sensory and memory fields appear at every instant, image to image, attributing to the things in themselves the mobility of the eyesight, that only light allows to capture and think about.

Vitor da Silva.
Oporto, the 22nd of February 2007

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