Cascos

For many, this is a collection of "strange" photographs, and there's always the hope that some will consider them "surprising."

These are photos that thrive on light, like any photograph, where color and its sensory power, time as a maker of textures, and more or less perceptible graphic elements dominate our gaze and our attention.

At first glance, these photographs don't refer to a place or a person, but naturally, they have a story, like everything in life.

A story that begins with a taste for visual arts and a special passion for abstract representations, for "wrinkles," for "skins," for the "marks" that time always brings.

No one remains indifferent to the sensitive tranquility and velvety feel of a Rothko canvas, to the monochromatic vivacity of Ângelo de Sousa, to the material painting of Tàpies, to the graphic elements of António Sena and João Vieira, as well as to the force of Charrua's broad and vigorous brushstrokes.

These photos, this exhibition, begin here: in painting and in what some have conventionally called "Abstract Impressionism," which I appreciate so much.

Starting here, being its story, this exhibition has a clear and unpretentious purpose: to demonstrate that the "abstract" is in our daily lives and is as real as the objects that fill our days, simply by looking at them with a different kind of attention.

As illustrated in the photo that introduces this exhibition and which documents the work of man on his work, all the photos depict boat hulls, with many tides and many lives, with multiple layers that the comings and goings overlay and many traces of another calligraphy. A story made of paint, light, shadow, and much sea with splashes of salt.

Layers, tears, scrapes, drips, wood, fiber, metal—in all of them we have the hand of man and the force of nature as builders of an abstract reality.

Without any artifice or trickery, these photos were obtained by placing the lens against boats moored ashore in Portugal, Cape Verde, Brazil, and Timor—places with a common language, each with its own accent—where we verified that the so-called "abstract" is nothing more than the reality that an attentive eye always discovers.