Editor’s Note: If you click on the Image Gallery icon at the bottom of this page, you can view the capital of Minas Gerais reconfigured and transformed by artist Fábio Carvalho. Like every tourist, he creates his own imaginary city. “It is no longer the impersonal and generic metropolis available to everyone, but another city, my Belo Horizonte,” says the Rio de Janeiro native. In the essays below, Carvalho provides some background about the works. The images appeared in an exhibition at the Belo Horizonte gallery Léo Bahia Arte Contemporânea in July 2003.
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Tours and Lodging in Belo Horizonte with WLH Travel, a company that shares our concern for sustainable and responsible tourism.
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The Invisible in Photography
The Invisible in Photography is a series of works in which a set of photographs was shot from the same point of view at certain intervals of time (from few seconds up to few hours). In the photographed scenes, there were always moving objects (people, cars, etc.). Later, the photos were digitized and overlapped.
Through a process of fusion, we no longer know which object belongs to which of the overlapped moments. The multiple instants from the original photos are merged.
In his "Short History of Photography," Walter Benjamin notes that in the photographic snapshot there is a "imperceptible place where the future nestles itself in unique instants, long in the past, so eloquently that we can discover it by looking backwards."
In this work, the "future" that might have been found is already there, mixed with the "past."
On the other hand, this "future " is already past, and therefore a possibility for another "future." Nevertheless, this cannot be actually discerned because we don’t know which "object" belongs to which "time." We have the past and future simultaneously, in a new kind of time that has never happened.
Photography, widely acknowledged as a snapshot of reality, does not help us anymore in this sense; it is not a witness of a singular event at a unique time. There is a kinematic dynamic in these photos, even though everything remains static, imprisoned on the surface of the photograph.
Assisted Landscape
Assisted Landscape is a series of works where drawings are made with permanent ink pen on acrylic. These drawings use as references postcards, posters, and photographs from newspapers, magazines and books. They all portray touristy landmarks or landscapes.
The images used as references are fixed under an acrylic plate. This work is a hybrid between photography and drawing, a combination of the two, creating a new image, dependent on both.
The drawing is done on an acrylic plate, not directly on the image. It "floats" over the image, as in the "lost aura" of the technologically reproducible images, as observed by Walter Benjamin in his well-known essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
These works, in a nostalgic way, give tired images, reproduced over and over and circulated infinitely, a chance to rejoin the world of the aural objects.
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Fábio Carvalho’s Website
Léo Bahia Arte Contemporânea
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Esta matéria em português
