At a time when the production of images is undergoing yet another profound transformation, certainly the biggest since the emergence of photography, it is precisely in this field and the issues intrinsic to its expansion and questioning that we will find Elisa Vieira’s proposals.
For Vieira, this questioning also involves incorporating the social dimension of the sacred, understood from a perspective of temporal depth: using the history of representation itself, through and in images, the author starts from the canonical use of the portrait and its printing on fabric to test it here in the photographic field, working on the limits of photography in this operation, in a logic of challenging the unifying and reproductive nature of the format, in the institution of the hyperrealistic world that constitutes our present.
In Valéria Martins’s case, the field of subjective and collective memory is referenced and crossed by the agility and speed of moving images. In this work, they are made known through a homely and objectively carefree register, in a parallel position to the current torrent of images from the intimate confessional plane, which, due to their profusion, professionalism and canon, merge into each other and tend to disappear in a logic of consumption quickly. In a movement that incorporates and affirms another intelligence and will, Martins’ work naturally dialogues with this type of register and speed typical of his generation, but manages to impose on them a celebratory, open dimension capable of inscribing in this project its critical dimension and its life as a sequence of safe and careful images, precisely because they are authorial.
Porto Artistic School