across the open field / em campo aberto

With the following artist:
Rui Hermenegildo.

text by Eduardo Brito, Filmmaker

What is a photographic series made of? In other words, what unifies, what gives meaning to a set of images, displayed on walls we move through, or, on the pages of a book that follow one another with the gesture of flipping through?

The question doesn’t hide a path to demonstrating some kind of evidence, rather, it serves as a starting point: we are adrift, and everything oscillates, like on a boat. Uncertain as in any principle: the exactness of a property, will correspond to a doubt in the opposite field. There will always be an irregular margin, a space of conformation close to dreams: everything so that a specific organizational proposal (the series) becomes disordered, fluctuates and, this way, gains a certain meaning for each of its recipients. Disorder is a force.

Normally, the function of such a text is to find a common denominator, capable of mobilizing an indefinite number of readers for an interval of meeting and acceptance where wills converge: of the author, the curator and, above all, the images. But it can also be the opposite of that - a space of agitation, capable of making the transparent opaque, the obvious mysterious, the firm line nebulous. When this happens, the series of images becomes intimate like a verse, paused like a photogram: in our imagination there will always be space for a before and an after for each photograph.

A photographic series is not made up of a sequence, whatever the reason that determines it: there is something akin to the beauty of well-deserved tiredness when the journey knows the destination without choosing the path to get there. And this implies understanding - from the author to the spectators - what lies hidden between each image, after each pause. In other words, scrutinizing the missing images between the images we see, anticipating the next movement of the statues in each photograph, that transforms everything into statues, that hold everything, that suspend everything.

Rui Hermenegildo images, displayed on gallery walls or in book pages, are precisely crossing points in an open field of this agitation: looking and connecting these photographs is a gesture of freedom and imagination: of a face hidden behind the curtain of a photomaton, of an aftermath, of the causes of the inscription of melancholy on a face, in what inhabits the darkness of a room, but also many other things, secret like a desire. As Kim Beil would say, there is always something inscrutable in each photograph whose mystery grows, later, in our memory (Anonymous Objects, 2024).

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls / Across the open field, leaving the deep lane / wrote T. S. Elliot in East Coker, the second of Four Quartets (1946): it is in these verses that rests, discreetly, a reading proposal: gestures of an involuntary repetetion, a psychic force, coming from dreams, recureences, obsessions and fascinations with the out of place, with the out of context (how can we forget Freud and the uncanny valley?), from things that cannot be explained but that have always populated a cosmogony that seeks to be seen and whose field - as a rectangle where the image exists and is limited by framing - opens up, in an imaginary expansion and continuity, of a narrative that prolongs and repeats until the end of time.