VIRGILIO FERREIRA

Daily Pilgrims

Mystic, poetic and introspective, the photography of Virgilio Ferreira (Porto, 1970) transgresses the borders between reality and dream, affinity and remoteness, earthy corporeality and sublimity. Though inextricably linked with the “battlefield” of everyday life through travels to geographically identifiable places and encounters with local “anthropologies”, Ferreira’s work goes as a whole beyond any plain documentary approach. It transmits the “aura” of a “palpable” human truth blurred by globalization and multiculturalism.

Ferreira has recently completed “Daily Pilgrims”. The project was born in early 2007 thanks to a one-month trip to Macao granted to the photographer by the Foundação do Oriente. This initial trip evolved in a three-month “observation” of daily life in some of the main Asian metropolises like Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and Bangkok, its objective being—according to Ferreira’s own words— “to stimulate the questioning of a human reality in its habitat and to reflect on the Zeitgeist”.

The immense socio-economical and cultural transformations taking place in Eastern Asia are a familiar topic in contemporary photography, but Ferreira prefers to remain an “outsider”. His out-of-focus images of anonymous human figures and bubbling city lights are miles away from the predominant tendency to examine whatever happening on the coasts of the Pacific these days as a symptomatic phenomenon of growing globalization and explosive capitalistic communism. Unarguably, “Daily Pilgrims” offers an approach unwilling to reiterate neither the cold serial formalism of the manufactured industrial landscapes of Edward Burtynsky nor the humanistic documentary gaze of authors obsessively looking for the ghost of Mao in every corner of Shanghai. “I am not engaged in collecting influences and in allowing them to operate on my work”, stresses the photographer. “My images suggest rather than show. I prefer the detail and the unobvious.”

“Today we experience the modern anguishes of the search for identity. This is the contemporary myth”, wrote once Jean Claude Kaufmann. Ferreira’s abstract symbolic universe, as constructed in “Daily Pilgrims”, seems to be fully in tune with this viewpoint. Replete with visual distortions, the series exposes critically the way in which our need as viewers for a “prefabricated” reading of pictures is stimulated by, what Ferreira describes as “a social demand for representation and invention of the several possible -ness”. By means of an unconventional perspective and of a striking insistence on fragmentation, colour formalism and blurring, Ferreira’s images operate literally as an obstacle fence for the eye. We are never able to figure out what is out there: between us and their subjects, there is no room for any identifiable “Other” or for any spatial contextualization in socio-political terms. Cities and humans become a generic fluid body of forms and colours, creating a sense of timeless sociology.

Ferreira feels as if drifting in history without knowing much about why and how things happen. “There are moments of lucidity and certainty, but the flow of life shows that we are a sum of trial-and-error attempts and of collages”, he affirms with conviction and so does his whole working method, which consists of a mix of technical rigor together with spontaneity and the capacity to find room for the unpredictable in the utmost staged images.

Let us take as an example of this the unusual angles and blurring—all typical street photography tricks, which operate in favour of a peculiar snapshot quality in the “Daily Pilgrims” series. Although there is no candid camera, when we look through these pictures, an accentuated sensation of inaccessibility and deliberate invisibility conquers us. Even the photographer himself seems trapped in this feeling. In a half-oblivious voyeuristic attitude, he disregards the possibility of actually “being there”, conscious of the fact that the cultural memory we inherit and take on as our “mother and stepmother” operates as the absolute deforming force upon our gaze, obstructing us from viewing the world in its pro-verbal and non-cultural essence.

Ferreira literally captures with his camera lens captures emotions, memories and desires. This is precisely what renders his images so attractive and imbues them with a Benjaminian-like aura. But Ferreira prefers to resort to a more down-to earth interpretation. When it comes to the “Daily Pilgrims” formal qualities, an interpretation related with rush, the main external factor, conditions his effort to catch the decisive moment”. As he remarks, “In these cities everybody is extremely busy and their first response is always negative. When you manage to get people’s permission for a picture, you have to shoot within a few seconds, while nobody bothers striking a pose for you”.

Yet, despite urban high-tech velocity, Ferreira achieves the picture that captures the magic with the help of his Rolleiflex medium-format camera. He still prefers to use a 6x6 slide film, avoiding any sort of digital manipulation, post-production or laboratory intervention. What is of paramount importance in the emotive dreamlike style of his traditionally processed prints is his “colour metaphysics”. “I identify with colour. I see the world in this way”, he says. On the other hand, illumination techniques vary. “Daily Pilgrims” implied working on the street with heavy equipment and no assistant, so Ferreira had to dispense with artificial light sources. Nonetheless, as he remarks, “the city lights worked perfectly for the final result”.

“Daily Pilgrims” is the most challenging work in the trajectory of Virgilio Ferreira. Articulated by many visual layers of presences and absences, it resists all given representations of identity. Assuming the role of a “pseudo-ethnographer”, Ferreira has built his approach not upon the exotic and the unfamiliar but upon what bridges our differences. “The answer to everything I do is people”, he emphasizes. By describing life as a harmonious conjunction of alchemy, sociology and spirituality, he takes us in the realm of a universal abstract sublimity, reminding us that even if places change, people will always keep fluctuating on the globalization roads. As Ferreira concludes, “All of us are pilgrims; maybe not in typical religious terms as the pilgrims of Santiago de Compostela, but we are, in an existential and pragmatic way. All of us have a unique mission to accomplish, looking for our path in the ritual of life”.

Text by Natasha Christia
May 2007

All Rights Reserved

© All pictures Virgilio Ferreira
www.virgilioferreira.com

ENRIQUE MUÑOZ-GARCÍA

Claude

Within the four walls, a story unfolds. “Claude”, an audiovisual installation by Enrique Muñoz García, reveals a different intimacy. Beyond anguish and pain, beyond the generic tendency of contemporary photography to project the body as a degenerate artificial construct in constant mutation, García leads our gaze to assailed territories of the human existence. By employing what at first glance appears to be an empathetic ad hoc observational practice, he allows for his protagonist to “breathe” and freely “perform” his state of being. As such, “Claude” produces the effect of an unseen, unique instant. Familiar yet so foreign, its intimacy perturbs our vision; close yet so far away, its ambient ultimately makes us wonder where the margins of this infinite world end up…

Our story starts in 2003, when Enrique Muñoz García, a Chilean photographer living in Switzerland, and Claude, a chronic heroine addict, became neighbours. Their encounter gave birth to the idea for the project, at least in García’s mind. It took some months, in the absence of cameras, for a mutual relationship of respect to develop before Claude agreed to be photographed. The rest is history.

Bathroom, living room and bedroom… The interior of Claude’s house provided the background of the project. “Bearing witness to life indoors became of paramount importance, given that Claude spends most of his time in his apartment, inhabiting it in the way he inhabits his own body”, explains García.

Of all the spaces, the bathroom reflects his universe in its fullest essence. The sequence of the daily cleaning ritual works as a metaphor for a personal process of corporeal purification after thirty years of addiction. Garcia’s approach looks neither for suffering nor for morbidity in all this process. On the contrary, he maintains distances, by rendering Claude’s body into a plastic element that appropriates its domestic surroundings as if they were his natural extension, -an ark heading towards the depths of human soul.

Still, the bathroom sequence is for strong nerves. Witnessing an over-exploited body that proudly carries the marks of its adventures provokes inevitably a sense of uneasiness. Diluted like blood and bodily fluids in the hot bath water, the white-tiled walls of the room carry the chilling aura of what could be viewed as a surgery room or, in a more literal approach, as a butcher’s shop. There is an ambiguity in the way Claude interacts with his own body that tempts us think that something -horrible- might happen from one moment to the next. At this point, the orchestration of the whole scene by García deliberately puts into evidence the confinement of our awareness within the codified norms of spectatorship. It reveals how we are actually predisposed to a response of suspense. It demonstrates the eruption between what “we are shown” and what we actually “see”, confirming for once more, in García’s words, the fact that “we see only what we wish to see”.

On a creative level, the project opened a door to challenge and experimentation. It obliged García to shift from his older practice of instantaneous black and white photography towards a more hybrid and complex lens-based language that transgresses the rigid forms of the classic social reportage in favour of a solid pseudo-documentary style based on the fusion between acting and spontaneity. As he recalls: “After many sessions with my Leica M6, I felt that there was something missing. I started working with a digital camera and a Hasselblad. Colour gave a new force to the whole theme”. And he continues: “Then in 2005, video came, at a moment when I was feeling limited by photography. There were many details I could not display through still images. So, I did a first test with an old movie camera, that worked pretty well because Claude forgot that the camera was there and went on with his daily ritual”. The final result of these incursions has been a video without cuts and interventions, conserving the original sound. There were also some further helpful additions, such as the decision to exhibit the stills separately, as part of a quadraphonic installation by the electronic band strøm, which is comprised of fragments of an interview with Claude and ambient sounds. Displayed in light boxes as if they were radiographies, the photographs generate a bathroom-like illumination in the room.

So far, “Claude” has been shown in the Biele Fototage of 2006 and in the Photomonth Festival of Cracow (2007). There has been very good press coverage and the project became a nominee among the best works of 2007 in Switzerland. In the meantime, García prepares to embark on a second part with material coming from the other two rooms of the house. He also plans launching the project in other international venues.

Looking back, García confesses: “These last five years have been very intense. They have taught me to relativise things and problems, to understand and not to be prejudiced”. As a result, the whole project is imbued with this openness of vision. It emerges as a highly intimate work, the fruit of a profound respect and admiration towards Claude, “a very intelligent and spiritual person who opted for the way of drugs since the age of sixteen and who does not question this option”, as García explains. In fact, Claude's life is much more than a drug theme: Son of one of the richest men in the region, he is a professor of Waldorf pedagogy who speaks five languages fluently and who has has envisioned, among others, projects such as the Schlossmatt Foundation for young handicapped people.

But more than anything else, Claude is the other half of a deeply collaborative project and the conversation inevitably has to end at this point. “Currently, Claude is in a healing process”, says García. “Of course, he still has his ups and downs, but he is very happy that there is recognition and acknowledgement. He has been an active part to this. After all, everything has been his own decision. It has been his choice letting me enter his life”.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
May 2008-unpublished

www.claude-projekt.ch
www.emgphoto.net

GERARDO AND FERNANDO MONTIEL KLINT

Matehuala


It was Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958), with its legendary opening shot, the film which first opened the eyes of the broader audience to the imaginary of the Mexican underworld. For once more, the cinema surpassed the books in terms of visual inventiveness. The location, where all the conspiracies, crimes and murders of this complex scenario unfold, is “Los Robles”, a seedy Mexican-American border town, literally drowned in corruption; a town seemingly reserved only for striptease bars, brothels, occasional gambling enterprises and gangs. At least the plot comes with a “man of Law”, i.e. Charlton Heston, featuring a Mexican drug-enforcement official, who is forced, due to uneasy circumstances, to interrupt his honeymoon with his newlywed girlfriend Janet Leigh, in order to take action against the villains and the self-abusing sheriff Hank Quinlan (featured by Orson Welles).

When it comes to Matehuala, the small Mexican town photographers Gerardo and Fernando Montiel Klint have employed as the subject of their homonymous brand new series, things seem to be less uncontrollable. To put it more accurately, everything in Matehuala points to a tricky silence proper to a no man’s land. Even so, the suspense and mystery condensed in the pictures of the Montiel brothers, alongside the undergoing rumours about the terrifying present of the city and its connections with drug trafficking and illegal business, make it hard for any subconscious mind, bred within all the dramatic tension of the Wellesian plots, not to think, view and feel Matehuala as the contemporary version of “Los Robles”.

Of course, to anyone familiar with the Latino culture, the name “Montiel” resonates for another simple reason. It alludes to female actress-singer “Sara Montiel”, who was to become in Franco’s Spain of the fifties the loyally Catholic, yet still not an any less sexually avid version of Ava Gardner, the first international star of the local film industry and the indisputable queen of legendary and linguistically inventive –at least, in terms of their respective titles– dramas. Admittedly, at first sight, any connection to Sara Montiel seems totally irrelevant and absurd in the context of Matehuala, but just take a closer look and you will come across an underlying parallelism that brings you a step forward when establishing the conceptual thread of the Matehuala project. For, similarly to Sara Montiel’s birth out of the deeper layers of the social imagery, the practice, the iconographical resources and the framework of Gerardo and Fernando Montiel are inextricably tied up to such a deeply rooted popular consciousness and culture, hard to imagine in any other place on earth than Mexico. Needless to say, by contemplating Mexico as such, one does so in terms of an unforeseen heterogeneity and an astounding cultural syncretism; the so-to-speak “Mexicanization of everything”, as Fernando and Gerardo Montiel like to refer to it.

To put it in another way: What happens when the visual conceptualism of the Düsseldorf School is introduced into the cultural and social context of a country so replete of colours, odours and sounds as Mexico? Well, it inevitably then fosters an envisioned “magic realism”, wherein raised walls are demolished, any presumed distance between the photographers and their subjects is cancelled and myriads of sudden, vivid and nothing less than surrealist encounters unfold in the middle of the desert.

Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint could go on talking for hours about the stories behind each of these apparently still pictures of Matehuala, all taken after the sunset. They recall camping with their equipment in front of a peculiar tiny house called “Restaurante Base Tomada”. In the middle of the night, to their surprise, lights went suddenly on and a bunch of girls in mini-skirts jumped out, asking them to disappear right away following the owner’s demand. The restaurant had turned out to be a brothel; clients were attended in a small deck room. They recall another scene that took place during the session of “El Rey del Taco”, when they were almost run over by the wife of the owner who thought they were a serious threat. They remember various risky occasions in which they were finally asked to immediately abandon the location with all their equipment. The mafia has full control not just on the earnings of these establishments but also on the people who hang around; above all, on people who pop up at two or four o’clock in the night. But, there is also a hilarious, absurdist side in all these adventures with unexpected endings. Like, for instance, the encounter the Montiels had with a painter in the middle of a deserted village. The man turned out to be a profound admirer of Ansel Adams and thought them to be too. Thrilled for having chanced upon two photographers in the middle of nowhere, he would fiercely insist on them immortalising with their camera the monumental landscape they were sharing! Likewise, another shooting initially planned to take place before an abandoned hotel, ended-up being a large photo session of a group of relatives. Unless they had taken portraits of the whole family, the Montiels would not have gained their permission for the final image!

“A photographer from Mexico can in no case be like a German or an American descendant of the Becher School taking pictures of warehouses, water towers or gas stations”, affirms laughingly Fernando Montiel and, amidst everything narrated above, he seems more than right. Here, in the middle of the desert, the “take the picture and go” attitude is replaced by a more interactive practice that asks for an interference with the subjects, the places and the people who inhabit them. At the same time, and inversely, these very same pictures reflect the fears, inhibitions and constraints imposed by the laws of the local bands and clans, the so-to-say highly complex social reality of these places. Each image contains thousand of stories, as a condenser of the “time before” – of all, properly speaking, coffees and drinks the Montiels had to share, in order to gain the confidence of the local people! It is perhaps for this reason why the two artists decided to dispense with the digital equipment and work with a large-format analogue camera instead. In this way, they could allow for time to intervene between the shutter and the human gaze, recovering the lost primitive immediacy of the photographic image. Far away from the technique of the snapshot, they were looking for a camera obscura effect, guiding the eye through the camera in natural time. As a result, the images of Matehuala are, indeed, “products of a photographic contemplation that dilates the vision in time”, as Gerardo Montiel stresses. What’s more, they are visual containers replete of voices, presences and absences; they are culminations and reflections of hidden stories and rotten façades.

Likewise, the suspension and tension imbuing these pictures is not played out as in a David Lynch film, but is a rather naturally inherent element of the Matehuala ambience. The night with its lights glooming in the darkness speaks for a town of abandoned hotels and old American-type neon panels, rooted next to the highway; the ghost town of a road movie, where in a silent, subtle complicity, many events happen. Almost as much, or even more, as during the ninety-five minutes of “Touch of Evil”. Plain and neutral, the photographic envisioning of Gerardo and Fernando Montiel plays with the façades of old buildings and trolley tracks, transmitting an unbearable sensation of loneliness and witting isolation. The gaze never retreats into the interior of these façades, never gets too close. For Matehuala is a town that safeguards its secrets.

“Matehuala is an ugly town, a town on the verge of nothingness. There is nothing to do in it, nothing more than taking a short break from long trips”, argues Fernando Montiel. “But when coming back from days in the deserts, days one has spent without proper food, drink and shower, then Matehuala can be a real oasis. It transforms into a place where one can have a shower and get some rest between warm sheets”.

Matehuala is a place of transit. Of less than zero interest to Mexicans, it is a small ghost town situated within driving distance, in the middle between Mexico DF and the States. It becomes a necessary stop for American and Canadian travellers and merchandisers. Many of these passers-by are attracted to it because of its local traditions and the cult of peyote, a small spineless cactus with a long history of ritual and medicinal use by the indigenous people. Under its effect, this stop can obtain a supernatural character; hallucinations help the traveller come in deep contact with a land sacred over the centuries for the shamans of the area, whose long ritual processions last for days and nights. But, in full light, the Americanized character of the town contrasts harshly with this mystic background, which still throws its midst on old walls. As if the dark and the bright side of life coexisted harmoniously, the Matehuala people carry on their backs a past and a present steeped in deep ambivalence. They know how to. Those “whose future is all used up”, in the words of the fortune telling madame played by Marlene Dietrich in “Touch of Evil”, know how to carry this ambivalence with dignity …

Fernando and Gerardo Montiel have chosen Matehuala precisely because, with its apparent nothingness, it encapsulates perfectly the “other side” of Mexico, far away from the typical tourist clichés. What’s more, Matehuala has been the starting point of the artistic synergy between the two brothers. Apart from their systematic collaboration on commercial assignments in the fields of fashion and advertising (the Montiels are founding members of Klintandstudio), this is the first time they collaborate on an artistic project. On a personal level, both brothers have gained notoriety and awards for their respective work in fine-art photography and are represented by international galleries. Fernando’s tableaux-vivants of domestic middle-class interiors in destruction and characters in nirvana, question with a handful of irony and sarcasm the “hallucinogenic” effects of contemporary popular myths, consumerism and collective obsessions. On the other hand, Gerardo Montiel introduces into his staged indoor or outdoor settings a much more denouncing documentary-type visual content. His photographic series –all of them the fruit of experiences and reflections recollected during journeys– hover over increasingly common social issues, such as violence and sexual abuse.

Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint like to emphasize the way in which the making of the “Matehuala” series not only opened new creative ways, but also enhanced the personal and artistic comprehension and complicity between them. During the process, the Montiels responded successfully to the challenge of attempting a different approach than the one they were used to, heading back to a more direct and archaic photographic practice. Still, they did put a lot of themselves into the project, such as the landscape element of Gerardo, the subtle irony of Fernando, and something of their taste for staging, though not in the literal sense of the word. Within the “Matehuala” series, there are pictures in which the two photographers make their appearance, together or separately, as two mere elements of the surrounding landscape and the human ambience. Their gazes always point somewhere and the spaces that surround them are always related to the states of transit or observation. In an attitude of intuitive contemplation and self-reflection, theses image testify a lot to the creative process; they actually intensify the complicity and the attachment of the photographer to his subject, adding up to the conceptualism of modern landscape photography an enriching entropic flavour. But for the Montiels, these pictures obtain, above all, an autobiographical significance as the celebration of their brotherhood. They are “decisive moments” caught up in time; small pearls of an introspective emotive journey; “petite souvenirs of a family trip, which instead of taking place before the Eiffel Tower, unfolds in the most absurd place of the earth!”, concludes with humour Fernando Montiel.

Matehuala has been just the first page in the diary of this artistic companionship. The Montiels are happy with the results and plan to carry on their projects in many other cities alike, illustrating an aspect of this Mexican double-faceted reality and idiosyncrasy many people still ignore. Now they have started, they do not have the least intention to stop. How could they, anyway? Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint are nothing less but two highly inventive “photographic animals”, breathing and living through photography!

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

All Pictures: Gerardo and Fernando Montiel Klint

Published in Eyemazing 01/2009

GONZALO BÉNARD

The Awakening of the Self

The encounter with Portuguese photographer Gonzalo Bénard brings to mind the ephemeral, yet deeply mystic moment of “epiphany” that accompanies any artistic creation. Contrary to what one wants to believe, being an artist does not merely involve aesthetic assertions and compositional skills. It actually goes far beyond this, as a double-faceted integral state –a blessing and a curse at the same time– that brings the collective consciousness closer to what Kant once described as the feeling of a universal aesthetic. Being an artist is all about an inventive gathering of impossibilities. Lyricism and poetry spring out of blood and suffering, and, miraculously, ideas flourish under the storm. Even if confined within the four walls of a house – their hands and legs paralyzed, their spirits and souls tormented – all artists are capable of making their way towards the sensorial, as long as they can aliment their ultimate need for self-expression. Nothing else matters; neither risks, nor deep waters. When the world seems to fall apart, artists rise out of their ashes and articulate their discourse. The unique ability of switching between death and rebirth seems to be exclusively reserved for them.

Hybridization, deconstruction and regeneration… Gonzalo Bénard belongs to a very special category of humans; those whose lives are comprised by many storylines. “Reborn” in various occasions, Bénard has been, properly speaking, a bit of everything in life: beginning as an art history, fine arts and computer science student in the late eighties, he went to pursue the career of publications´coordinator in the cultural Centre of Belen in Lisbon, gained notoriety as the coordinator of the Pavilion of Portugal in the 1995 Venice Biennale, left everything for a three-year residence in the painting school of a Tibetan monastery, came back, became a painter, finally ending up an emerging photographer. In his convoluted biography, everything assumes the dimension of a seemingly unreal, yet so extraordinary revelation, whereby the natural and the organic give shape to a body made of clay, earth soil and light.

Bénard’s encounter with photography could not have been more sudden and intense. Likewise, the amount and quality of the body of work the artist has produced within an extremely short period of time, could easily make many of today’s alleged fine art photographers burst with envy. For Bénard is nothing less than a genius, and as such he can be all and nothing at the same time; human and God, significant and insignificant, tangible and intangible. His eyes lie wide open as two gates to the mystery of life and his story contains all the elements of an epic-like narrative in which a deeply rooted humanness is intermingled with a constant challenging of obstacles. Facts do not simply happen to Bénard; they rather happen as to provide the stage where his artistic play can unfold, prescribed by a mysterious destiny.

An “intruder”, still unknown to the photography world; this is how one could describe Gonzalo Bénard. Apart from a prize he won as a 13 year-old child for his work with an automatic camera, his interference with photography remained scarce until the age of 37. Within him, there had been absolutely no longing for photography. During his three-year reclusion in a Tibetan monastery, the only contact he had with a camera was a light box. He was there to train as a painter rather to take pictures! But the right moment was about to arrive…

The shutter of the camera opened for Gonzalo Bénard the day other doors seemed to have been shut forever. One morning, Bénard woke up blind, due to an allergic reaction to a cat. Two highly complex operations helped him recover his vision fully, but, in the meantime, his health had been for once more under serious threat because of a motorcycle accident that left him with a serious rupture of the spine. Six months of physiotherapy were to follow. Being in intolerable physical pain, Bénard was forced, during this period of time, to suspend all his upcoming shows, adjust his needs to those of a disabled person, and most importantly, reinvent his whole artistic practice. “It became impossible for me to paint because my vision was lacking depth and volume”, explains Bénard –his voice calm while he brings the story from memory to words. “Still, I would die if I did not create. I had to create”. So, he resorted to the camera he had been using before, to document his paintings. From then on, photography was rendered the catalyst through which he could canalize the stream of his everyday emotions. It became “therapy” and “energy”, accompanying him throughout the whole healing process and conferring voice to a very personal and intimate universe. Since then, two years have passed, two sole years that have been enough for Bénard to generate a masterfully arranged set of work of an astonishing quality, as if he were always in photography, as if the “photographic” were always a part of him.

In terms of references, Bénard’s photographic practice resides on the knowledge and the maturity he has inherited from his years as a painter. Yet, although one could easily attribute his accomplishments to his fine-arts background, neither the subject of his photographs nor their style approximate in the least the surreal paintings hanging on his living-room walls. Whereas the dreamful mood of these artworks makes a clear allusion to the human subconscious and to a world compiled by infantile reminiscences of the past, Bénard’s photography turns to the real world of the present and the flesh. Following a very intense period of his life, his photographs speak of the “now”; what’s more, they reflect a process in which personal demons are exorcised and a creative liberation takes place.

Black and white has become the means of expression in Gonzalo Bénard’s photographic practice. Bénard avoids the exuberance of colour and prefers to limit his vocabulary to the basics. The path towards personal truth is always ascetic and so is his photography. Juxtaposed with earth symbols and animals and deprived of any clothes, the body is introduced to a nexus of complex symbolic connotations, alluding to myths and pagan legends. Bénard’s vision emanates from a nature outside the context of western culture. His spiritual journeys have brought him close to tribes and cultures as much diverse as the aboriginal voodoo and Las Madres del Santo in Brazil. In this search for the intangible, the body and the soul proclaim relevance as vehicles of a non-verbal entropic narrative that resides outside the margins of history. In this respect, Bénard’s self-portraits defy any notion of the ego. They operate as non-portraits, within which the artist is a rendered part of the form and the medium. His inexistent corporeal ego becomes subordinated to the soil of the land, the way rocks and animals do. In its primordial essence, this very same body, in all its plastic qualities, breathes an unforeseen sensuality, which, however, can in no case be described in terms of a cultural eroticism, incited by the voyeuristic gaze. On the contrary, Bénard’s images point to a natural sensuality beyond conventions, stereotypes, cultural canons and behaviour schemes. Following this, it is upon the viewer to come out of the social constructs, recognizing himself as part of an unmediated nature.

A body, a room, and plenty of natural Mediterranean light coming through the windows… For those who are after the secret of Bénard’s technical perfection, there is no more to this. Depleted of lights and sets, Bénard’s studio is his own house, accommodating the whole world. Comparing to Diane Arbus and her fragile marginal creatures showing us the “other” side of life, Bénard speaks through his personal intimacy for the dignity of the body and the soul, as if the truth of the whole universe resided not far away but right there, beneath the skin. Such a universe defies any notion of beauty or ugliness. By enacting its own corporeality, the body becomes the key of exaltation and revelation for all objective and universal truths; it becomes the ultimate incarnation of spirit.

Growing therein as a remarkably broad and sustained body of work, Bénard’s photographic oeuvre assumes a novel dimension. It is not just a mere conceptual proposition, but, first and foremost, a work connected to the heart. Bénard always takes his self-portraits in the morning, while the body is still connected with the unconscious. “There are good and bad nights”, as Bénard likes to emphasize, but what remains is the body, the very same body, coming out of the world of dreams. The wrinkles of the sheets drawn on the skin, the self before the camera, a black sheet as a backdrop, no furniture or mise-en-scène. Just some abstract sketches on the wall; a primordial vocabulary unfolded within an uncanny universe of personal exorcism and truth; an immediate forceful act of self-awareness. It is impossible not to be honest at the moment of waking up!

And the creative river bursts on with such rage, making up for the years of silence and the creative repression experienced during childhood. Bénard recalls himself as a ten-year-old child back home. He was brought up and raised as a strict Catholic by a bourgeois Lisbon family who would dream any career for him, but that of an artist. He remembers drawings being torn –he should be a doctor, not a painter! He remembers his footsteps sealed –a man should walk, not dance! He recalls his lust for the two pianos of the house –pianos are meant for ladies, not men! Sheets of paper forever torn and non-played scores pilled up on the big traumas of a childhood… Nowadays there is no uneasiness left for all this repression; solely the need from time to time to shut the curtains and dance in the darkness under the sound of the piano. Yes. In Bénard’s studio, there is always a piano playing; a piano embracing the day-to-day creative process; a piano recompensing for the loss of time. Over the years, Bénard would leave behind all unnecessary burdens and track his own path: he would switch from cultural management to painting, then from his hometown Lisbon to Barcelona, and finally, just two years ago, from Catholicism to Buddhism –he is the only renegade of the Catholic Church of Portugal. There was no need for a revolution within someone who had been carrying his authentic self in his toolbox from the very beginning, but the need to cut the ropes off …

“A father and a mother of myself”, this is what Gonzalo Bénard claims to be. Protector yet solitary and profoundly independent at the same time, he encounters his ultimate spiritual companion in the figure of the eternally nurturing wolf. His eyes exalt a lust for creation, the lust of a highly sensitive as well as dynamic creator, intensely committed to authenticity, who has managed to transform a parenthesis in his life into a unique relentless journey towards self-recognition. When referring to this aspect of his work, Bénard rightfully identifies himself with the introspective universe of US based photographer Misha Gordin, who he feels a profound admiration for. Both artists experienced a creative explosion through photography. Photography was what finally gave them a push -on the one hand Gordin, a Lithuanian émigré after the Second World War, and on the other Bénard, an artist many years in creative exile - to cut their roots and reinvent themselves.

Bénard has conquered photography. Now he dreams of the convergence of his three big passions; photography, painting and poetry. In the meantime, a new genre gradually manifests itself within his artistic practice: video. Paradoxically, Bénard’s videos are less movement and more stills, driven by an insatiable desire to capture the moment and to investigate the density in suspension persisting these portraits. Time helps the body to unfold its secrets and the underlying spirit to emerge. In the aftermath, it is for the lyricism of the written word to come in the form of verses, sealing a universe of complicity. For Gonzalo Bénard is a poet as well! An intransigent romantic poet of the 21st century, who is there to remind us that Art is a gift and a reason to fight for, fight well, fight honestly…

All images: ©Gonzalo Bénard

Text: Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Published in Eyemazing 01/09

La Visión del Otro. La modernidad y el rostro fotografiado

Text edited for the show The Vision of the Other. Modernity and the Photographed Face, at KOWASA gallery (March, 2009)

Spanish Version_
KOWASA gallery presenta “La Visión del Otro: la modernidad y el rostro fotografiado”, una exposición colectiva que indaga en la construcción discursiva del rostro fotografiado antes de que éste fuera abatido por su anulación postmoderna. La muestra propone, en primer lugar, un recorrido por la historia del retrato con el fin de vislumbrar la manera en que éste pasó de ser una mera “extensión del cuerpo pintado” al género fotográfico por excelencia y, por otro lado, ilustra la manera en que evolucionó la percepción estética y conceptual del retrato, dejando atrás el Pictorialismo a favor de la experimentación y subjetividad modernista.
La exposición reúne más de 70 fotografías en blanco y negro cuyos protagonistas son personajes como Coco Chanel, Ernest Hemingway, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Dalí, Josep Pla, Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Jean-Paul Sartre y Marilyn Monroe. Entre los más de 50 fotógrafos presentados aquí, figuran los internacionales Nadar, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Horst P. Horst, Edward Steichen, Josef Sudek, Arnold Newman, Man Ray, y los nacionales Joan Colom, Francesc Català-Roca, Xavier Miserachs y Alberto Schommer.
A propósito de la muestra, ATELIERETAGUARDIA realizará sesiones de retratos empleando el colodión húmedo, una de las técnicas fotográficas más emblemáticas del siglo XIX. ATELIERETAGUARDIA heliografía contemporánea es una plataforma de trabajo para el estudio y el ejercicio del procedimiento fotográfico que centra su interés en los orígenes de la fotografía y su evolución en el siglo XIX.

La llegada de la fotografía contribuyó a la revalorización del retrato como una propuesta más apta que la pintura –un “Rembrandt perfeccionado”, en palabras de Samuel Morse. Realizados con procedimientos que requerían un largo tiempo de exposición, los primeros retratos conllevaban varias imperfecciones y un resultado final que suponía a menudo un ataque a la vanidad de las personas retratadas. Así, pronto se puso en marcha la maestría del retoque y un ejército de retratistas entró al servicio de las demandas estéticas de la época. Si en el siglo XIX reinaba la convicción de que la fotografía “robaba el alma”, en el siglo XX la fotografía misma pasaría a ser su “espejo”. A partir de esta idea profundamente arraigada en la imaginación popular, la misión del retrato se dirigió a captar con sofisticación el “aura” histórica, y los estereotipos sociales y culturales predominantes.
Las poses de introspección, la sobreactuación, los fetiches burgueses y la representación armoniosa de todas las partes del cuerpo conforman algunos de los rasgos visuales de la retórica ortodoxa del retrato. Si la toma fotográfica directa proporcionaba los datos suficientes para reconocer a alguien, el retrato –la supuesta puerta al alma–, al ostentar la pertenencia del ego a una clase social, terminaba paradójicamente por violar este principio.
El Pictorialismo (finales del siglo XIX–principios del XX), pese a su carácter progresivo y reivindicativo, no hizo sino fortalecer esta ideología con sus himnos a la interioridad y constante flirteo con la pintura. Aunque ahora el estatus del individuo como representante de una clase social se desdibujaba a favor de una reflexión visual que proyectaba los rasgos emocionales y espirituales de la persona, los Pictorialistas en ningún caso infringían las reglas del juego, el pacto, es decir, entre lo socialmente imaginario y lo finalmente representado. El concepto pictorialista quedará arraigado en el retrato fotográfico a lo largo del siglo XX a pesar de las rupturas y los cambios. Incluso cuando los logros de la modernidad y los planteamientos críticos de las vanguardias europeas lleguen a popularizarse a partir de los años treinta y en la posguerra, será para enriquecer el lenguaje visual del retrato convencional y para construir un discurso persuasivo más dinámico con variantes iconológicas que alimentarán la mitología y las narrativas populares. Uno de los casos más característicos es la fotografía de celebridades y de actrices, en la que se plasman el rostro y el cuerpo conforme al mito. Por otro lado, los retratos de personalidades de la política y la cultura se recubren a través de poses obsequiosas que les asocian de manera irrevocable con sus nombres. Aquí, más que nunca, el rostro se convierte en asunto público.

Mientras tanto, la naturalidad en las poses y la cultura de la instantánea fueron ganando peso a medida que las pequeñas cámaras democratizaban la práctica fotográfica. A partir de los años veinte, las vanguardias denunciaron toda aspiración mística por descubrir qué había debajo del rostro, para adentrarse en el campo de la experimentación estética. Esta nueva mirada, según la que, en palabras de László Moholy-Nagy, “cada poro, arruga o peca tenía su importancia”, se proclamó con voluntad resolutiva: había llegado el momento de divorciarse definitivamente de la pintura, de celebrar las propiedades inherentes a la fotografía (la cámara-ojo, el negativo y el positivo), y de prescindir de una puesta en escena clasista, para centrarse en una representación del mundo exterior más abstracta y geométrica. La experimentación con el medio fotográfico, las sobre-exposiciones, el formalismo, los ángulos especiales, el primer plano, así como el fotomontaje, son algunas de las prácticas concurrentes en aquella etapa.
Otro elemento significativo fue la inserción del psicoanálisis y de las teorías freudianas en el discurso de representación. Si el retrato tradicional propagaba la unidad de la identidad, estas teorías, adoptadas en primer lugar por los surrealistas y círculos artísticos afines a ellos, reinventaban el rostro como algo superficial, poniendo en evidencia la dualidad de la “persona” y la máscara que ésta construye para aparecer ante los demás, la polarización, por así decirlo, entre el “ego interior”, el “super-ego” y la imagen social enraizada.

Por su parte, la “fotografía directa” expresaba su escepticismo frente al sujeto bajo la influencia de las teorías marxistas, que propagaban la consciencia de un ser social. Después de la segunda guerra mundial, este debate se intensificó y se vio dominado por la sinécdoque documental. La fotografía de retrato salió del estudio para capturar los personajes en su ambiente natural –el artista en su taller, el compositor con su instrumento, el escritor con sus libros y, sobre todo, el fotógrafo con su cámara. Rostros captados en momentos de descuido desmitificaban el sistema y las imágenes sociales establecidas. La instantánea y la fotografía cándida de la calle rompieron la complicidad entre sujeto y fotógrafo y dinamizaron la concepción tradicional del retrato. La problemática se trasladó entonces a lo que Barthes describió como la batalla de dos identidades con dominios discursivos distintos: por un lado, el fotógrafo-voyeur y su visión, y, por otro lado, el sujeto fotografiado que elabora su máscara social con el fin de respaldar su imagen. En esta última etapa, los retratos, en lugar de ser “espejos del alma”, llegaron a reflejar más bien la personalidad del fotógrafo. El discurso de la mirada y la ruptura del retrato como unidad permitieron ambigüedad y humor a la hora de la representación. Aún así, seguía en pie la fe en el mito que esta vez le tocaba al autor encarnar. Poco faltaba para la “ruptura definitiva del espejo” que se impondría, a partir de los años setenta, sobre la percepción de lo humano, y que daría paso a la abolición del “rostro” de ambas partes implicadas, tanto del sujeto como del “auteur” detrás la camera.



English Version_
KOWASA gallery presents “The Vision of the Other: Modernity and the Photographed Face”, a group show which attempts to define the way in which the human face was photographically constructed before its abolition by Postmodernism. The exhibition primarily offers a thorough insight into the history of portrait photography with a special emphasis on the shift of the portrait from being a mere “extension of the painted body” to being the photographic genre par excellence. At the same time it highlights the aesthetic and conceptual evolution of early portraiture from Pictorialism towards a modernist experimentation and subjectivity.
The exhibition gathers more than 70 black and white prints whose protagonists are Coco Chanel, Ernest Heminway, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Dalí, Josep Pla, Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marilyn Monroe and others. Among the more than 50 participant photographers appear such internationally renowned names as Nadar, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Horst P. Horst, Edward Steichen, Josef Sudek, Arnold Newman, Man Ray; national photographers include Joan Colom, Francesc Català-Roca, Xavier Miserachs and Alberto Schommer.
Throughout the exhibition ATELIERETAGUARDIA will be organizing portrait sessions using the technique of wet-plate collodion, one of the most emblematic photographic processes of the 19th century. ATELIERETAGUARDIA heliografía contemporánea is a platform for the study and practice of 19th century photographic technology.

The advent of photography contributed to the re-evaluation of portrait art in regard to painting as, in the words of Samuel Morse, an “improved Rembrandt”. Obtained through processes which required a long exposure and which resulted in many imperfections, the first portraits in the 19th century often suggested an attack on the vanity of their subjects. Following this, it is hardly surprising that the increasing aesthetic demands of the time very soon resulted in an army of portraits-makers at the service of retouching mastery. If the conviction that photography “robbed” the soul reigned in the 19th century, in the 20th century photography would become the soul's mirror. Under the impact of this idea which made a deep impression on the popular imagination, portrait photography was conferred the mission of capturing with sophistication the historic aura, whilst reflecting in its discourse the predominant social and cultural stereotypes.
The poses of introspection, the overacting of the bourgeois fetishes and a harmonious representation of all the parts of the body constitute to some of the visual characteristics of this orthodox rhetoric of the portrait. Whereas the direct photographic take was supposed to provide sufficient data for recognizing oneself, the portrait –the supposed door to the soul– paradoxically ended up violating this principle by prioritizing a visual vocabulary that flaunted the pertinence of the individual into a social class.
Pictorialism (late 19th century-early 20th) came to embody this ideology with its hymn to the inner being and its constant flirt with painting. Even if the status of the individual as agent of a social hierarchy was now fading in favour of a spiritual reflection that projected the emotional qualities of the person depicted, this did not mean to say that the Pictorialists were infringing upon the rules of the game –to the contrary, the deal between the socially imagined and the final representation was still preserved. This pictorialist concept remained firmly rooted in fine-art photography portraiture throughout the 20th century despite its ongoing ruptures and changes. Even the critical accomplishments of the European avant-gardes, which were widely popularized during the thirties and the post-war era, were adopted by portrait photography so as to construct a much more dynamic, persuasive discourse whose variants continued to fortify the mythologies and popular narratives of the time. Among the most characteristic cases is the portraiture of celebrities and actresses, whereby face and body were shaped in accordance to the myth. Likewise, the portraits of public personalities –politicians and artists–are enveloped by means of obsequious poses that associate them irrevocably with their respective names. Here, more than ever, the face turns into a public affair.

In the meantime, with the introduction of hand-held cameras, the naturalization of poses and snapshot culture were gaining terrain. In the twenties, the avant-gardes denounced the mystic ambition of discovering what lay behind the face, and instead began to pursue aesthetic experimentation. In this new way of looking, according to which, in the words of László Moholy-Nagy, “each pore, wrinkle or freckle has its importance”, the goals were quite distinct: the time had arrived to become definitively divorced from painting, to celebrate the inherent properties of photography –the camera eye, the negative and the positive. It was time to push aside the classist mise-en-scène and focus on a much more abstract and geometric representation of the external world. This experimentation with the photographic medium included over-exposures, formalism, special angles, close-up, and photomontage.
Another important element of modernist portraiture in its most mature phase is the insertion of psychoanalysis and Freudian theories in its visual discourse. If the orthodox portrait propagated the unity of identity, these theories, first adopted by the Surrealists and the artistic circles linked to them, reinvented the face as something superficial, planting evidence for the duality between the person and their “persona”, namely the masquerade one constructs for others –that is to say the polarization between the ego, the super-ego and the eradicated social image.

For its part, direct photography was expressing its scepticism before the subject, under the decisive influence of the Marxist theories which advocated the consciousness of a social being. The debate became intensified after the second-world war. Portrait photography came out of the studio for good, capturing its subjects in poses of apparent informality within their natural environments –the artist in his studio, the composer beside his piano, the writer among his books, and above all, the photographer with his camera. Faces captured with carelessness demystified the system and the established social imagery by establishing an iconology of social synecdoche. Snapshot and candid street photography broke the complicity among the sitter and the photographer, and dynamized the traditional conception of the portrait. The problem now shifted to what Barthes has described as the battle of two identities with distinct domains: on the one hand, there is the photographer-voyeur, and on the other the photographed subject which elaborates its social masquerade to back up its image. In this new age, rather than being the “mirrors of the soul” of the sitters, portraits reflected the personality of the photographer. This ongoing rupture of the portrait as a unity accepted ambiguity and humour at the time of representation. The modernist faith concerning myth still persisted, although, at this time it was not projected by the external world but instead, by the author and his camera. It would not be long before the gaze turned its back on it. In the early seventies, the definitive “rupture of the mirror” would cause the final abolition of both implicated parts, the sitter and the “auteur” behind the camera.