9,2 x 22,2 cm | open edition
Rio de Janeiro
“Twilight, how gentle you are and how tender! The rosy lights that still linger on the horizon, like the last agony of the day under the conquering might of its night; the flaring candle flames that stain with dull red the last glories of the sunset; the heavy draperies that an invisible hand draws from the depths of the East, mimic all the complex feelings that war on one another in the heart of man in the solemn moments of life.”
Charles Baudelaire
Daily, after sunset, the sky near the horizon line acquires a plethora of tones between the blue of the day and the gradual absence of light until the darkness of night arrives. This twilight phenomenon, which has inspired writers and artists of all eras, provokes the aesthetic experience centered on the sensitive perception of colors, on the contemplation of the natural spectacle of lights that are modified in the fugacity of the instant. It is necessary to be in the right place and at the right moment to contemplate the multiplicity of strokes in celestial pictorial layers that deconstruct before our eyes in a few minutes.
Throughout 365 days, the artist Analize Nicolini was at this specific time and place photographing lights and colors, between the sky and the sea, in the twilight period of Leblon Beach. The process began by investigating the luminous intensity through her window. From that moment on, an almost ritualistic routine was established when going to the beach. Using the same equipment, with the same lens since the first photo, she guaranteed that the chromatic research was homogeneous, without technical interferences. The manual fine tuning of the camera was only finalized when the lens captured the same color intensity observed by her retinas. Once back at her home, the confirmation that the digital image, enlarged, had passed through the sieve of the color table established by the look of that fateful evening. And, thus, she reached more than 4000 images recorded during a whole cycle of solar translation, walking the path of repetition for the necessary determination of the experimental process.
In the Rouen Cathedral series, Claude Monet painted the same church on different lights at different times of the day, capturing the surprising transformation of its appearance. All the movement and mobility of the image was shown through to exteriority, while the object itself remained motionless. Monet thus introduced a new dimension of the momentary and sudden character into the painting. Impressionist art and photography share some particularities, among them that of portraying light through light itself. Impressionism was considered an attempt to synthesize modern art to a merely optical dimension. On this labeling given to the movement, art critic Meyer Schapiro argued that the reduction of impressionist interests to "purely visual" would be a "cultural phenomenon and a choice" of the artists themselves, as well as "action, religion and myth".
Analize's poetic choice has a symbolic meaning that goes beyond the merely visual or formal aspect of the work of portraying light. When she arrived in Rio de Janeiro three years ago, the artist, who was then dedicating herself to painting quickly realized that the beautiful landscapes of Rio "were forged in the precariousness of the city", in the insurmountable abyss of social inequality. She observed that, the beach, considered with reservations, the most democratic of public spaces, would be one of the few places where the heartbreaking disparities seemed to be reduced. She chose to reproduce the lights that surround Morro Dois Irmãos and the Vidigal favela. From there its residents shared the same aesthetic experience of twilight with the photographer from Leblon, with the metaphorically significant contrasts in the colorful nuances of the everyday urban sky.
The beach, as the location of this research, which is a tourist attraction that is frequented by thousands of people in a single weekend, is another representative choice. A place of mass entertainment and the city's postcard, it is one of the most photographed points in the virtual world of social networks. It may seem paradoxical to guide a contemporary experimental production through a manually calibrated photograph, at the same time that hundreds of beachgoers are recording the same moments with their cell phones. But it is exactly in this shared place "common" to all that Analize shapes her poetic process, reaffirming the need to bring art closer to the public. It is in this everyday landscape inserted in the Rio de Janeiro imagination that the observer identifies the place as an immobile object, starting to experience the chromatic singularity of each moment, carefully captured by the artist. And it is still in this space-time "of everyone" that the originality of Analize pursues the creative luminosity of reflections and textures that, sometimes, transform the circumstance almost into an abstraction.
In the famous essay "The work of art in the era of technical reproducibility", when addressing the disappearance of the "aura" in art with the advent of copying, Walter Benjamin points out that "making things draw closer to us, or rather to the masses, is as passionate a tendency of contemporary man as overcoming the unique character of the situation of each reproduction. Every day, the need to possess the object as closely as possible in the image, or rather in the copy, becomes more and more irresistible". Benjamin's concern, in the 1930s, referred to photographic and graphic reproductions, and to cinema, which were constitutive of the modern urban life of his time. The philosopher could not yet consider the frantic character of digital reproducibility in the 21st century, where there is not only the possibility of having images literally in the palm of our hands, but also the resources to manipulate them, creating our own truths. In this aspect, Analize's work seems to rescue some remnant of aura by developing a detailed technical process in the act of photographing itself, when it despises, in a certain way, the camera's technological resources.
Just like when she chooses not to treat the images, tearing down technical barriers, so that the printing of images reaches the reliable result of reproducing the tones experienced. It transforms photography into a mere means of materialization of the experience of the gaze.
Of the thousands of images photographed by the artist, 21 works in large formats are exposed here in this site-specific performance art. With the participation of art educators holding the pieces, the Leblon's Lights series is presented to passers-by who walk by the beach, during the sunset. Spaced apart, the works traverse a rhythmic path between Borges de Medeiros and Rita Ludolf streets. The participative experience of the spectator, by following the path of the works and contemplating the twilight of the afternoon, represents the conclusion of Analize's poetic process. A book with approximately 120 photographs will be released on the neighborhood's centenary anniversary, on July 26, 2019, when the audiovisual record of this performance will also be available to the public.
The poem, quoted in the title of this text, would be even more enchanting if the poet Charles Baudelaire had known this beach. It would translate into words the strength of our twilight with the mastery of he who had identified 'the ephemeral pleasure of circumstance' in the early days of European modernity in the mid-19th century. In today's dark times, when the city exposes its wounds, Analize's invitation affectionately soothes the pains of the city. In the contemplation of this action, which is at the same time collective and profoundly particular, the visuality of the beautiful allows us to dream, in the fugacity of those few moments of lights and colors that tear the firmament, even knowing that everything will be quickly faded by night.