Variations on a Saturated Pearl
Review of “Pearl” 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.
Translated by José Roseira