The Brazilian artist Luiz Braga presents his second solo show at Galeria Leme, this time exploring new formal possibilities with the series Nightvisions.
In development since 2006, the series came out from a new experience to the artist, until then faithful follower of the analogic photography and known as an expert colorist. With a digital camera bought in 2004, the artist found a simple resource, created to seduce amateurs, which allows photographing in almost complete darkness through the use of infrared. At first photographing at night, Braga decided to transpose the technique to daylight.
Also inspired by the military application of this resource, which came out to the media in the Gulf War in 1991, the photographer added to his equipment several different filters that maximized the effect, subverting the reality.
With the use of this technique, landscapes and individuals loose their natural colors to be filled with a dense and at the same time shining light, which seems to emanate from projected light spots that come from elements making up the scene such as the sky, the clouds, the treetops. Monochromatic, the series opposes to the common saturation of the digital images produced in contemporaneity and approaches engravings and etchings.
For the first time exhibited in group, the works propose a new possibility of aesthetic perception for the author on his land and voyages, reflecting a healthy uneasiness in searching formal alternatives for his artistic creation, besides celebrating the encounter with the nature always by his side, waiting for the moment to blossom.
Once again Luiz Braga holds off the common consciousness and aesthetic ideals of locals in which he photographs, most of them in the Amazonia, deepening the intimacy built during years, rivers and creeks populated by modest people and full with dignity.
About the artist:
Luiz Braga (Belem do Pará, 1956, lives and works in Belém do Pará).
Brazilian exponent at the 53rd Vennice Biennale (2009), is winner of the prizes Leopold Godowsky Jr Color Photography Awards at Boston University, Prêmio Porto Seguro Brasil and Marcantônio Vilaça, Luis Braga has works at the Modern Art Museum of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Contemporary Art Museum of the University of São Paulo, Fundación ARCO, BESart – Colecção Banco Espírito Santo, Miami Art Museum, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo e Photographic Resource Center at the Boston University.
