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Pearl

Text by Ana Matos

Throughout the centuries, the concept of Landscape has been transformed by distinct interpretations that the artists of each age have instilled in their works of art. In Antiquity and until the 15th century, we can find, most of all, the landscape as an element of the Historic Painting, which sought after the ideal of "Natural Beauty". With the scientific achievements of the Modern Age, our knowledge of Nature and of its phenomena — and its "objectivization" — made it possible for landscape to establish itself as an autonomous artistic genre, yet still very classic and naturalistic. Throughout the following centuries, and until the early 20th century,  landscape painting was approached by great masters like John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and Jean-Claude Monet, one of the icons of Impressionism. During this period, as a consequence of the industrialization and urbanization of the modern world, artists developed a different sensibility and awareness of what "landscape" was. We keep finding, in modern and contemporary art, the presence of Landscape as a genre, influenced by other social and geographic events. After all, it has always been there and it is what the Earth has the most.  

With this noticeably short overview on the History of landscape, I want to highlight one aspect Tiago Casanova's Pearl focuses on, which is the approach that artists have had and keep having on landscape: there is Man and his intervention on Nature. Therefore, Landscape is not only an aesthetic or geographic "identity", but also a place, a territory that results and reacts to the transformations produced by Man. Known as the "Pearl of the Atlantic" since the 1960s, the island of Madeira (Tiago Casanova place of birth) is the place he was interested in exploring. He sought to discover different locations in his island with the sensibility of a virgin eye, searching for the splendor of its natural settings. At the same time, we sense his profound knowledge and aesthetic awareness of the intervention of Man on that very same landscape. Between these two forces - Nature and Construction - there is the comfort of a viewpoint from which we enjoy the landscape, and the confrontation with a road that bursts into the sea. Madeira’s natural and urban landscapes are captured by a contemporary photographer in a work where there are visible marks of the artist’s background as an architect. Pearl reclaims that ethnographic sense that many bestow on the artistic practice. Let us follow Hal Foster’s call and get back into the Real. A sustainable, fair and better real, one that can respect Nature and Man, one as much as the other.  

Breaking Ground

Text by Darren Campion

The forces that shape a society are, in themselves, largely intangible; they cannot readily be seen and neither are they fully understood, even by those who would presume to wield them. So how can a medium like photography, which is most often stubbornly literal, be used to visualise this evolving present without resorting to the familiar tactics of photojournalism? This question, among others, is what Tiago Casanova confronts in his series Madeira, describing the complex new social topography of the island, which reads like a case-study of the changes that have also redefined the landscape of mainland Europe. Here, it is especially visible as a study in contrasts between the native terrain and the anonymous – one might almost say, corporate – style of recent developments; the images are often framed in such a way as to emphasize this telling difference. This is not to suggest, of course, that a ‘state of nature’ is somehow preferable, or that the particular character of this new architecture spoils the otherwise pristine, indeed, often forbidding landscape. Rather, at stake is the issue of how deeper changes in social structures (such as the movement of capital and populations) are articulated as surface conditions that determine the way people live. The material expression of these changes as seen in various forms of habitation and infrastructure, which Casanova is obviously very attentive to, should not be understood as simply a matter of style, but of how a particular moment in history makes that social order possible.

The fact that Madeira is a sheltered island community at somewhat of a remove from European centres of power, did not protect it from those same conditions that precipitated near disaster elsewhere as the markets plunged and our financial systems seemed on the verge of unravelling. Understood as being both a symptom and an outcome, the shift to an unsustainable economy of speculation, as well as other, even more elusive forms of production is evidenced by Casanova’s remarkably precise images. It is hard not to see the blank concrete pillars of a motorway overpass towering over an older road as being a sort of bridge to nowhere, marking a decisive break with a now unreachable past – not because those forms of social organization were necessarily inferior, but rather because they were less profitable, less in thrall to the hollow promise of development for its own sake. The reserved, austere style of the work might appear to be at odds with what is ultimately a polemical statement about how the character of a certain place has been transformed, but it is precisely this quality that allows the work to function in the way it does, without reducing these complex issues to mere illustrations. Instead, he is able to locate them in the experience of the place itself and how it is seen, as a continuum of spatial and social orders. If the real forces of political change are not always readable in the landscape, then we must at least try, as Casanova does here, to discern their effects.

Variations on a Saturated Pearl

Text by Sérgio B. Gomes
For P2 Público Newspaper

If there is one thing photography cannot deliver easily, it is evidence. In our innocence, we tend to look at it as the record closest to the truth, a trustworthy medium. Often, this plays to its disadvantage (due to the scope of the expectations it creates) and what has been posited as seemingly true ends up revealed as an illusion or as a disfigured reality. The images that compose Tiago Casanova’s photographic essay Pearl give us some evidence, and one of the most staggering is that of the saturation of a space, the island of Madeira.

Native to the island, the photographer dedicated part of the last years producing images that depict the conflict between nature and construction, trying to avoid the judgements and “political readings” that a work with these characteristics may call for. 

His journey through buildings, roads, bridges, marinas, columns, belvederes, pools, concrete and asphalt opened a new field of research — the fascination with the landscapes created over the ones that existed before, with tenuous and subjective boundaries between what is beautiful and what is unsightly. An entry in a travel diary (Casanova is a trained architect) is evidence of this state of mind: “The built landscape confronts the natural in a dual way. Great scars are carved on the terrain, but the consummation of the act makes the constructed elements part of a new landscape, which causes both disbelief and fascination.”

Pearl (an allusion to the “pearl of the Atlantic”, the epitome for which Madeira is known) will be shown at Museu da Imagem de Braga from April 12 (it will later travel to Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Funchal, between November 10  and January 3, 2015). The first piece of the exhibition, Paisagem Híbrida [Hybrid Landscape], is a series of black and white Polaroid photographs and won an honorable mention in Prémio de Novos Talentos FNAC, in 2013. Including several images from the series Madeira and a book (whose mockup was selected by British photographer Vanessa Winship to the First Book Award, bestowed by MACK publishing house), this exhibition is the last of this project, which the author used to reflect on the impact and transformations introduced by human constructions on the landscape of Madeira.

Another evidence (even if this one is less evident) that transpires from these photographs is that human beings are always willing to push the limits. Not only those of nature and of the material world, but also the limits of common sense. And those of decency too.

Novos Talentos Fnac

Text by Mário Teixeira da Silva

Landscape is the leitmotif of Tiago Casanova, who won the second prize. Nevertheless, the photographer does not go after the probable beautiful color photo, but rather goes for small format black and white Polaroid images. They are reminiscent of the common photographs of old-time photo albums, with their jagged edges reinforcing this reading. Registering the fragments of a landscape in small-format black and white photos, the photographer creates a somehow detached perspective, a travel diary in which he registers the often-chaotic aspects of human intervention on the landscape. In this port-folio, we find details that are formally interesting, others that approach the sublime, and some that depict elements of a landscape that transmit a certain awkwardness, when not irony, produced by the inconsequential actions of human beings.