Eva Resende - Portfolio

Eva Resende 2022

Eva Resende (Porto PT, 1995) works with phenomenological processes in image construction. Her principal aims are to investigate how the image can be formed and altered as well as how the image can be revealed and concealed by repetition. These investigations further lead to questions regarding the nature of the image itself (as ontological form) .

In her methodology the artist uses the magic lantern, photomontages and google earth images as prostheses to conceptualise and understand the function of the human eye from a psychological, sensory and a cognitive perspective.

Other themes that the artist explores include the work with memory as a concept, the Anthroposcenic concept (with environmental engagement) and the life and death-drive (as elaborated in Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theory) expressed in a biographical photographic archive.

Although, having a background in painting, the artist works within several disciplines. She links analog photography, cameraless photographic processes, engraving, video, installation, and digital media applying these various techniques in accordance with the theoretical and practical basis of the work.

Recently, lead on by conceptual and visual research, she has worked in a close link between visual analog practices and new digital media.

P.1 _VENN´S DIAGRAM : ART OVER AND AFTER APPROPRIATIONS

The diagram is made as a sort of investigation to gain a wider understanding of an artist’s universe with the references and influences that comprise it. On the focus of the primary project questions research, it´s made a process of selection and elimination of contents, concepts, and works by other artists.

The appropriation of images of other artists’ works becomes the material for artistic practice and a testtube for research.

Venn's diagram

Several images were taken from the internet of artistic works

Diagram design in the Adobe Illustrator 14174 px X 14174 px

P.2_ARCHEOLOGY OF IMAGES: MANIPULATION, TRANSFER, AND DISSOLUTION OF THE PHOTO-ARCHIVE

The work uses photography integrating with engraving as an anti-aesthetic alteration of the image that accentuates its manipulative qualities. This is roughly marked out by an aggressive use of scratching (as if drawing in dry point) the photograph onto the metal plate. The images are transferred, but there is also a contrary effect in the process. The transfer destroys the image leaving only ghostly and fragmentary remnants of the initial image matrix. Through the dissolution of the image the metallic plates gain a new body (forgetting or a distancing of the primary photograph from the archive).

(from the Archeology of images: manipulation, transfer, and dissolution of the photo-archive) Toner transfer over aluminum 25cm X 25 cm 2021

Archeology of images: manipulation, transfer, and dissolution of the photo-archive

Installation of 24 transfers on aluminum plates install on the wall each plate 25 cm X 25 cm 2021

Mother Nº7

P.3_DESTROYING MEMORIES SERIE

The act of marking out a photographic image on a zinc plate with acetone alters its primordial referent. The process is primitive and therefore the resulting image is a mere phantom fragment.

In a second instance of printing the plate is taken to its extreme through the repetition of the printing of the plate. The image becomes entirely abstract often losing any similarity with the original photograph. The image is thus erased by the repetition of engraving. Thus, the attempt to reproduce (or in a symbolic way to remember it by its repetition) the image, in this case, results in the opposite effect by gradually becoming more abstract.

Destroying Memories, Nº10 Engraving on colored fabriano paper 25cm X 25cm

P.4_PHOTO-BIOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE PROJECT - MOTHER

“Griefs, blows, pain, abandonment, sadness, depression. Will I ever be like you? Oh! Mother who threw me into the world. I hope not, because I could be condemned by the genetics to a sad and weak madness” (Eva Resende, 2017 from the textual file).

The repeated use of the same photographed element elevates the photographed subject (in this case the mother) to something symbolic. This repetition is used in a therapeutic and cathartic way to overcome the death drive.

Mother Nº13 (from the Photo-biographic archive)

Fomapan Classic ISO 100 (film size 13 cm X 18 cm)Large-format camera provided and built by FBAUP assistant

P.5_ATLAS OF MEMORIES

These images, that take up the entire dimension of the wall, are associated with the artist’s personal memories.

These memories are then meant to occupy the space like a “virus”. The images themselves are revealed by a chemical process but can also be destroyed by excessive washing.

This process of revealing and concealing the images is linked with the phenomenological symptom of forgetting and remembering traumatic episodes and are related to Melanie Kein’s theory about the life and death drive.

Detail of the installation

^ Atlas of memories

Installation of 17 superimposed fabrics (bichrome gums, cyanotypes, and serigraphic prints) mounted on the wall 700 cm X 250 cm 2021

P.6_PALIMPSEST SERIE (MEMORY, FAMILY, AND REPETITION)

This Serie is developed in three parts that consist of photo-biographical archives, paintings, and biographical text.

The images are created using a cameraless process where it is the light, by falling the photosensitive chemical materials is the element that makes them reveal (by contact with the photographic negative or painted on acetate).

In this technical process, the eye that sees is not the human or the photographic camera, however, making a poetical comparison this can be replaced by the Sun.

Palimpsest Nº1 (memory, family, and repetition)

Gum Bichromate in fabric and mounted on wood, acrylic paint, pigments, and varnish

P.7_PHOTO-BIOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE PROJECT - FACULTY´S GARDEN

This work is a photo-biographical archive. It includes references to Melanie Klein’s “the good object” (the artist’s photographs of college, friends, photomontages of family environments and love-letters) and “the bad object” (photographs of her mother, documents about suicide and depression). The archive is an accumulation of photos into single work, where each image nevertheless stands out on its own(having their own imagetic and reflexive independence). The motifs are repeated cyclically. They are finally broken down, and multiplied into different ways of contemplating the theme, conceptually and visually.

Faculty`s Garden Nº30 (from the Photo-biographic archive) Salt print on watercolor paper

P.8_PHOTO-BIOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE PROJECT - A32

The autobiographical archive consists of the artist’s analog photographs. These often display places of her home and the FBAUP.

More precisely do they display memories of places of comfort as well as of trauma, which intertwine on the highway A32, a route daily taking by the artist. Despite not considering this project confessional art, other examples being works by Tracey Emin or Nan Goldin, the work operates with an open narrative by use of fragments of photographed elements.

P.9_I JUST WANT TO RUN AWAY

The installation’s prototype operates as a light-box, an optical device from which private archive-images (printed on acetate film) are projected.

The images display personal content of the artist. They are accumulated like a patchwork-panel on the car windows and are thus projected towards the outside like a light-box, exposing an intimate narrative to a public space.

The car, that unites the places photographed, thus becomes a cry of desire that gives way to the title of the work.

I JUST WANT TO RUN AWAY

P.10_MAKING IMAGES APPEAR PROJECT

A magic lantern is constructed as a technological simulacrum of the phenomenological processes of vision construction. Similar to the image construction in a camera obscura, the magic lantern also inverts the image.

Experiments with magic lantern were first carried out with objects and later with replicas of paintings (example of Gerhard Richter’s Woman Descending the Staircase).

In the process the magic lantern dissolves the image until total abstraction. This process is cyclic and finally restores the image: the painting is inserted into the magic lantern and its projection is painted (more diffuse than the one inside the object). This last projected painting re-enters the magic lantern to be repainted its projection. This process is repeated until the image is abstracted.

The image is revealed but the optical device blurs it, dematerializes it until its dissolution.

P.11_PROJECT DIAPHRAGM

An analytical experiment of the construction of the human eye-pupil or camera diagram. A construction of 24 tabs that open and close in a circular mechanism. This is a project that investigates technological mechanisms to quantify the entrance of light by using this method.

Schemes for building optical tabs

Vector drawing in Adobe Illustrator 2000 px X 2000 px 2014

Optical movements

laser cut on wood (woodcut)

charbonnel ink on fabriano paper 30cm X 40 cm

P.12_ORYCTES NASICORNIS PROJECT - OR AN APPROPRIATION OF KHEPRI

The beetle (scientific name of Orctes Nasicornis) and the history of photography are here the central research-elements.

In ancient Egypt the beetle (Kepri) incarnated one among many deities that corresponded to the Sun and symbolised the force that carries the sun across the sky.

The relationship between Kepri as the sun; the investigation into the history of photography (by focusing on Talbot’s premise that light is the “pencil of nature”) finally makes a correlation with the material or photographed world. This material world is impersonated by the stone lapiz-lazuli, with pictorially correlates with the ultramarine pigment.

Oryctes Nasicornis - or an appropriation of Khepri (Conceptual research map for the project) Installation with varied materials: photographs, drawings, paintings, texts, pigments, acetate sheets, etc...

Oryctes Nasicornis - or an appropriation of Khepri Nº15

on watercolor paper

Oryctes Nasicornis - or an appropriation of Khepri Nº43

Sculpture installation: Scarab, lapis lazuli stone, ultramarine pigment inserted inside aquarius

P.13_SERIE - FROM THE BALCONY: PICTORIAL VARIATIONS IN AIR SPACE THROUGH TIME

The view from the marquise of the house extends for kilometers with no other visual barrier than the morning fog that often accumulates around the D. Luís bridge in Porto. This view is photographed several times with Polaroids, recording the variations in the light occurring during the day. A Praise of Rouen Cathedrals, Monet’s Paintings.

Thus, the atmospheric variations of the landscape are demarcated by the Sun in the time it takes it to travel across the sky. Our ocular retina retains and adapts to these variations.

6 pm of 13-03-2020

(from the serie - From the Balcony, pictorial variations in air space through time)

P.14_TIME, VIDEO, AND EYE PROJECT

This project explores what David Hockney calls “Multiple Window” which can be pictorially correlated with works by Pieter Bruegel and Van Eyck. This is not just a mere painting or a wide-angle photograph taken as if it were a fisheye. Rather it is the fusion of optical theories with eye-tracking that is associated with video (they are then fragmented into frames using a computer PrintScreen). By this process the construction and the composition of the image are premeditated. These montages are positioned in an anti-aesthetic way in relation to the “normative” principles that are considered normal in painting, such as is seen in e.g. loco observation painting.

This three-parted division of Time, of the Eye (observing the visible world), and the Video (the technological prosthesis of the eye) that records it constitute the principles of this project .

P.15_AFTER THE MAIDS (FROM PAULA RÊGO)APPROPRIATIONS AND PHOTOMONTAGES

This serie is constituted of a single video that explores photomontages. The starting point is a visual referent to the work “The Maids” by Paula Rêgo.

In the methodological process of the work, the video PrintScreens are compiled into an Adobe Indesign document and the images are digitally assembled. In this process, the selection; the choice of image uses it; the reference point of continuation “of a collage”, all these choices that determine the final composition vary depending on the montage decisions made. This is because these choices determine whether the final image will be closed (a lot of depth of field and little information or extension of the image limits) or if, on the contrary, said in parentheses, it will be open (a fisheye that leads to its limits aperture field, which often exceeds 180º).

This is thus a study and reflection of the composition of the image and the eye/camera that records it.

After The Maids (from Paula Rêgo) Nº5 Oil on canvas

P.16_VARIATIONS SERIES : REPLACING COLORS

In a comparison with the RGB chromatic process a series of serigraphs are carried out as pictorial exploration. The layers overlap each other, culminating in a three-coloured image of a pixelized nature, existing a parallel with the analogical technique of serigraphy and the digital universe (picture in contemporary technological devices).

Variations of “To Genre Painting, Nº1” (from the series time, video, and eye)

Serigraphy in 3 colours on Fabriano paper 50cm X 35cm

P.17_QR CODE SERIE

In this work the image is conceived from the dialogue between the digital and the analog as a phenomenological prosthesis of our experience with the world in a highly digital age.

Egg tempera paintings represent in a crude way QR codes. The paintings, that to the subject´s eye seem to reveal only monochromatic abstract information, possess the actual function of QR codes, and the spectator can access them by use of a cell phone(opening content that can be understood by the viewer, even questioning it).

The QR codes open up content leading to various web pages (with content such as happening via zoom, gifs...).

The website links also contain an institutional critique of the faculty museum (where the codes are exhibited) as well as the institution’s archaic teaching methods, hinting at works by Andrea Fraser.

QR code Serie

5 egg tempera paintings on wood prepared with Bologna powder

4 with 28,5 cm x 24 cm and other with 33cm X 28 cm

2021

Learning in an Antropangeia Era: 06/9/2021 - Time 15.45h (GMT+1)

Egg tempera on wood prepared with Bologna powder

28,5 cm X 24 cm

2021

In an out - Image and phenomena: Eternal Loop in repetition

Egg tempera on wood prepared with Bologna powder

33 cm X 28 cm

2021

Study for creation of an authorial entity

Egg tempera on wood prepared with Bologna powder

28,5 cm X 24 cm

2021

The Art`s (not) here Egg tempera on wood prepared with Bologna powder

28,5 cm X 24 cm

2021

Utopian building under construction

Egg tempera on wood prepared with Bologna powder

28,5 cm X 24 cm

2021

P.18_ANTROPANGEIA PROJECT

The Antropangeia Project explores territorial intertextuality and is carried out in collaboration with Rafael Oliveira and Jorge Marques. This project was developed under the prism of globalisation and the interaction of people through technology, in particular with the internet. By using such method that the MAP project (University de La Plata, Argentina, University Muxia, Spain and University do Porto, Portugal) has been developed. We can in the light of this fictionalise a universe that a little poetically can be called “pangaic” human territory, referring to Pangea, the geological epoch when all world territory was united. The work is full of imaginary iconography in which the map reveals a territory inhabited by one united population under a common flag and anthem.

P.19_ANTHROPOCENE SERIE

Each work in this series is divided into three parts and a fourth that is a radicalization of pictorial practice. The first work is a printed google earth image, or rather the map/image processed by a technological object that expands our phenomenological experience of the world. The image further breaks with the limitations of human perception.

In a second moment, news related to an environmental crisis appears (the google maps show´s their place). Here color-tests are performed for the third point. In this third segment of the work a pantone painting is carried out, replicating colors from the google earth map as if it were a color matching (a reference to Francis Alys, with the video Color Matching, 2016). It is thus that the fourth work reveals itself. At this point the painting is nothing more than an artifice that selects colors from the map and reproduces them.

The theme (Anthropocene) proves various limits to an expression in painting. These are revealed in this mere technical exercise as if it were an absurd action. Painting, per se, becomes absurd in the face of the world’s dilemma.

Anthropocene - Nº3 Australia

Mixed media (four visual and textual elements: oil paint and bologna powder on paper glued to wood; oil paint on oil paper; toner print with oil ink and another toner print)

P.20_ANTHROPOCENE AND MAPS - ARTISTIC BOOKS

Through the appropriation of a collective and universal “image-storage” that is the internet, images are taken from google earth (this technological prosthesis expands our visual perception of the world) of places critically affected by environmental changes. These sites are then mapped out and reconstructed with engraving in a failed attempt to catalogue.

These maps however easily fall into mere visual compositional explorations.

Variable dimensions 2021

^

Some pages from Artist´s books

Anthropocene and Maps Nº1, and Nº2 Artist’s book realized in Fabriano paper with Charbonnel ink

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS

2020-2021

Erasmus+ Program at Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, IT

Attendance of Massimo Pulini (painting) and Maria Agata Amato`s (printmaking) atelier in Master course degree. Recognition and accreditation grade of 19 (out of 20), corresponding to an A on the European grading scale.

2013-2021 (with interruptions)

Bachelor´s Degree in Fine Arts (Painting) at the Faculty of Fine Arts of University of Porto, PT Conclusion with the final grade of 16 (out of 20), corresponding to a B on the European grading scale.

SOME WORKSHOPS AND COURSES

10/2021 - (ongoing)

Continuous Training Course- Portfolio

Directed course by University of Porto, PT

10/2017 - 12/2017

Arduíno Initiation Course

Course conducted by Center of Footwear in São João da Madeira, PT

2010 - 2013 Painting Course

Attendance to Painting classes at the Art Center in São João da Madeira, PT

OTHER EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

(ongoing process - selected)

20th Aveiro Young Creator Contest 2022 Aveiro, PT

08/09/2021 - 09/09/2021

INTEGRITY - European Student Convention

Convention with Trinity College Dublin, IE; Utrecht University, NL; University of Copenhagen, DK...

05/09/2021

Feira da Alegria (Art Fair)

At Crystal Palace. Porto, PT

SOME COLLECTIVE EXHIBITIONS

12/2021 - (ongoing)

Emergir “Emerging”

Art Gallery AL 859, Porto, PT

Collective exhibition in collaboration with Art2act and AEFBAUP.

22/06/2021 - 30/06/2021

Open Tour 2021 - THE FUTURE IS NOW - ABABO is Open Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, IT

Curated by Luigi Tazz

09/06/2021 - 14/06/2021

Ao Postigo - Finalist Exhibition - Bachelor in Fine Arts (Painting)

Museum of Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, PT

05/2021 - (ongoing)

MAP Territorios Intertextuales

Travelling Exhibition at the University of Murcia, ES; University of La Plata, AR and University of Porto, PT.

Curated by Maximiliano Gòmez Rodriguez

07/02/2020 - 19/02/2020

Drawing in uncertainty, From process to project #3

Museum of Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, PT

12/02/2015 - 27/02/2015

“Start...” (3rd Edition)

Museum of Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, PT

30/11/2012 - 19/01/2013

26th Annual Students Exhibition, Art Center

Cultural Space - Paços da Cultura, São João da Madeira, PT