Carcara #16

AN EPIPHANY WITHOUT MYSTICISM

“Silence…” is the title of this series of photos of Octavio Cardoso. They ask, maybe demand, solemnity and introspection to be contemplated. There is something beyond them. They are not completed only at our glance. They invade our subconscious.

At the same time that we look at them, we look at ourselves.

What do the photos hide in their aesthetics, dark and silent? The beauty of these photos interferes directly in the subjectivity of each one of us. Our history merges with the hidden story of each viewer. In the relation subject/object something happens, like an epiphany without mysticism or religiosity. Octavio Cardoso transfers his introspection to each of us. His open work invites us to dive in his work and in our unconsciousness. The stories which emerge will bring more emotions to contemplation. From Para, Octavio Cardoso subverts the Amazon forest. To obtain these images, he looked for moments with less intensity of light – before sunrise and in the afternoon, with discreet luminosity. “For the mood I wanted to create in the imagens, it was not possible to photograph in high sun, once I distorted colors, playing with filters. I realized that in light it didn’t work and that in the dark it was better.” Until that moment, first semester of 2013, most of Cardoso’s photos were in black and white. He explains: “Color, to me, was for documentational photography. So the distorted color of this series means to make images more subjective, mysterious, to take objectivity from colorful. Blue is more unreal, and I tried to create this place, my particular world, with features of loneliness, calmness, silence. These are landscapes of absence, nothing or almost nothing, to see, to feel, to think… in silence.”

He has photos in Colecao Pirelli/Masp de Fotografia (https://www.colecaopirellimasp.art.br/autores/285), which sums up his biography like this: Octavio Cardoso was born