Stones, endless lines, cracks, holes. Wombs, mineral uteruses. Generators of forms, of objects, of things, of substances. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Joachin Patinir invented his landscapes from a close, thorough study of stones and mosses from which he composed sublime forested mountains. In 1611, Phillip Hainhofer, a merchant from Augsburg, wrote to his brother about the stones he called “florentine”, describing them “mit selbstgewachsenen Landschaften” (with self-generated landscapes”). Hainhofer supplied the duque of Pomerland, as well as the king of Sweden, with his famous kunstschranken (cabinets of curiosities)[1]. Stones as images, stones with images. Stones that generate imaginary landscapes, landscapes arising on stones.

 

The stones where gestures were first laid upon, the hands, the images. Where images were born. Nurture, matter, mother. Scenario, background, substance, material. Forms from forms. Substances from substances. Countless cosmological traditions in which “man” is made, constructed, and made with pre-existing material: it is a transformation, perhaps a transubstantiation, an animation of that which is inert. Whatever the process, divine, voluntary, random, chemical, alchemical, astronomical, or astrological… All is everywhere, from the tiniest to the greatest, from Pliny to Carl Sagan.

 

This exhibition looks for these semblances, these relations. It fictionalizes them, establishes them, constantly. It does it especially in the immutability of the mineral world, as Cezanne did in geological structures. It looks for it in the rigour of its framings, in the tactile proximity of textures, in the use of light and shadows. In what is small and big, in what is close and far, in what is inside and outside.

 

A relation to the world, the whole world, through each concrete element, each concrete individual fragment. Each fragment, each detail is a vestige, a remnant of a path undertaken, a trace. Each one is significative; each tells stories and each one is the item of a collection.

 

We return to Hainhofer. Kunschranken, kunstkamera, the fashion of the cabinets of curiosities. But also kunst, art, artifice. These deep holes, like these images, return us to opposing poles, in a specular relation that is, after all, photography – that is ultimately, the image itself. Reflexes of light, traces of the sky, clouds on the water that gathered there. Shadows and light. In the landscape tradition of the intangible.

The tradition of landscape, where these works definitely belong is, however, that of the general plane, it is the contemplation of the vastness of the world. Here, in these works, a plane of proximity is imposed, and in each small thing, the vastness of the world is insinuated. Here, we can read a proximity, which I feel like calling “feminine”, of “care” and not of “masculine” “heroicity”.

 

It is, as in Matisse’s painting, a humanized, modern nature, of people who, when depicted, are swimming and sailing and having fun. These are images where the specular relation between the world and photography, between macro and micro, allows us to think photography metalinguistically, but are not constructed as conceptual objects. And they are also objects of our time, of the Anthropocene: where does nature begin and culture – art, and artifice end?

José António Leitão, 2022

[1] Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Aberrations s.l., Flamarion, s.d., pp. 89, 96.