ALBANO AFONSO . OUT OF REGISTER

Whenever we contemplate something, engaging with a specific object or subject, we do so out of a desire to internalize the significations and broader meanings of an occurrence, a landscape, a person, an object, a gesture, or even a work of art. These meanings are indeed broader, because when a certain referent appeals to a degree that we subject it to a more detailed visual scrutiny, it's not only the faculty of vision that we put into action for this prolonged moment. Within the duration of that moment, a co-relation between the self and the other is established, in which other senses are soon called into play.

 

We can infer that contemplating is a way of perceiving the target of our interest beyond its appearance. It is an adventure in which our sensory streams are enlisted to produce an enhanced sort of vision that is able to investigate, both thoroughly and gently, the interstices, nuances, and gaps of this referent that is drawing us to it. To a large extent, it is also a dialogic perceptive gaze, since to unveil the latent meanings of the other, or of something, we are necessarily also looking into ourselves, letting our mood, our intellect, and our unconscious react freely with this enjoyment.

 

Thus, all contemplation is also an enhanced mode of vision that takes place not only from the eyes outward, but also inward, into ourselves. When this circuit is put into operation, we are close to a meditative state.

 

Photography is the sphinx of a contemplation. A monument built by the effects of light striking a photosensitive surface, tasked with generating the simulacrum of a contemplation that the photographer believed should be made permanent. As researcher and photographer Boris Kossoy has said, a photograph reveals not the reality of the moment of capture, but a second reality, the reality of the two-dimensional printed surface, subject to being organically and symbolically altered in its temporal journey towards infinity.

 

Could, therefore, a photographic record give rise to the potential of the contemplative ecstasy that originated it? Or, could a photograph itself be the trigger of this enchantment, exchanging the experience of the lost instant for the contemplation of the very medium that contains it?

 

Thoughts like these arise when we observe the new photographic series by Albano Afonso. Fora de Registro [Out of Register] is created by means of technical and poetic strategies that generate a sort of illusory seismic shock where we seem to be seeing the photographed thing and not simply an image printed on a surface. The idea of photography as a window that magically dislodges us from our space-time is refuted in the artist’s metalinguistic proposal.

 

The artist overlays several images made in sequence and rearranges them so that the representation of the referent is “out of register,” which is printmaking jargon for when the several plates used for printing the various colors that form the image are not aligned, resulting in a blurred effect. This approach, along with other creative techniques, transforms the photographs, taking them beyond being merely passive camera reproductions.

 

By subjecting the images to this process, Albano Afonso seems to be echoing René Magritte’s iconic statement, in this case suggesting: This is not a bouquet of flowers, it is a photograph. By disrupting our mind's tendency to wander, preventing the illusion offered by photographic mimesis, the artist peels back the mirror-like play of the representational system, placing us in front of these photographs, which intentionally fail in their attempt to be a mirage.

 

A failure can also be the trigger that leads us to contemplation. If the sphinxes that appeal to me in these images are no longer the bouquet of flowers, the work of art, or a constellation, then what is it that keeps me connected to them?

 

Albano leads us to look at photographs as if they were... almost photographs. Bereft of the illusory mimetic game, of their power of mirage that brings us to past times and spaces, these photographs have no aim to lead us to any place beyond them. They are no longer merely a support, nor a passport.

 

The contemplation now takes place in the materiality of the photographic copy itself, and in Fora de Registro, these images seem imbued with an irrepressible desire to be a sculptural event. After all the strategies the artist set into motion, what remains before us is not the fabulous promise of photography, but rather its structure; the center of our speculation is no longer somewhere beyond it, it is the material medium itself.

 

In this operation, the image is no longer the promise of anything; it becomes an exposed fracture, a relic. We are therefore contemplating the failure of a promise, and thus, we are finally led to see the framework, the constitutive elements of a collapsed image, rather than an image as a whole.

 

Fora de Registro marks Albano Afonso’s triumphant return to the entrails of the photographic, in his selfless project of speculating about the realm of technical images and the effects they have on our perception. In his career, the artist has already investigated the image-imagination dyad from various standpoints: projection, movement, the genesis that forms the image, the brightness that reveals even as it blinds, etc. Now, the artist is passionately engaged in the possibility of contemplating the raw language, photography in a state of suspension, self-analyzing its place in a world dominated by assertive algorithms that disorient us to the point where, for better or worse, realities and fables overlap, leaving no traces that would allow us to understand where and why they emerge before us. This clearly involves a timely political thrust, as the artist sounds an alert about the hypnotic effect of the nature of the photographic image.

 

Deactivating the illusion also contributes to a more critical and less dogmatic point of view. Albano unveils this possibility by presenting photography as a sovereign body vibrating intensely before our eyes. Photographs that begin and end in themselves. Monuments that have shed their false heroes.

 

Eder Chiodetto