Tiago Casanova’s Shanghai is a visual series that conveys a personal and cohesive vision of a certain light and architecture present in this important Chinese city. Composed of a set of very plastic and poetic images that escape traditional perspective representation, they capture Shanghai’s architecture and essence using light and abstract shapes filtered through the imagination of Tiago’s lens. These images produce a strange and strong impression on us, and I suspect this has to do with the tension that exists between what we see and what we can imagine in them. As a result, one can recognize on those nonrepresentational images patterns and meanings that are both known and unknown. In fact, the city is framed by an abstract and poetic gaze, disruptive of how we normally look at architecture and, in this sense, the artist attempts to go beyond “representation”.
Tiago explores Shanghai at night using photography as an instrument of representation, liberated from the need of depicting the real. An instrument that poetically renders our perception of space and light while capturing the ambience of the city in a novel but complex way.
If photography only captures the surface of things, as Thomas Struth once noted, then Tiago is trying to reveal something more than Shanghai’s appearance and iconic buildings. With these plastic and poetic photographs, in which light and focus were purposely manipulated, the artist creates a new world of representation that somehow borders the universe of Painting, expressing the perception and iconographic qualities of Shanghai’s buildings and light in a surprising and unsettling way .
In fact, Tiago has bravely detached his work from the field of traditional photographic architectural representation, where linear perspective and time play a key role, and has instead plunged into the realm of color and spatial deconstruction. While the rules of Euclidean space were disregarded, we can still perceive the city and feel the symbolic and colorful characteristics of Shanghai’s architecture.
Translation review by José Roseira