LUCAS SIMÕES . LAVA-OLHOS DE EMERGÊNCIA: CRITICAL TEXTS BY POLLYANA QUINTELLA AND CIRO MIGUEL

“I'm fascinated by what comes through, beyond image or text, when you work with older sources: printed photographs, period magazines, reproductions of models and drawings. They bear the mark of a time that has only recently slipped away.

So what feeds me in this research is not only its content but the time the material carries: the print, the paper, the grain, the silver of the photograph. These leftovers of the analog era convince me that people could once believe in a future by design. I found this most vividly in my research on Brasília, leafing through Oscar Niemeyer's Módulo and the images of the Arquivo Brasília.

Perhaps our belief in the future is what belief in myth was for the ancient world. Egypt shaped its society around myth, around cycle and permanence, the Nile's return and Osiris's. Contemporary capitalism faces the other way, toward what has never been. This may be the modern myth that still holds us today: not a god, not a river, not a crossing, but the Future.

There is no innocence in this reading. Projects exist at every stage of realization, and what is never missing is the future itself. It arrives, only differently, the way every great expectation departs from its outcome, the way conceiving a sculpture is not the same as making it. That future is the real that proved possible, unfolding in front of us: a present of the future.

What interests me, then, is not the "myth" itself but the mechanism that solidifies it: the image. The documentary photograph creates the future through proof: this is already happening. The model makes it easier to believe through promise: this will exist. Two different authorities, one effect: an image that sustains belief before its object exists.

Today this mechanism is cracking. The image is no longer proof; it has become suspect by default: is this real? What seems lost is the capacity to imagine. The digital image is fast, with no fixed size, no texture, no wear. It arrives finished, with no flaw to invite me in and no reality at all. It has become the opposite of imagining.

The modern image was once a powerful engine for all kinds of narratives. Its unraveling has left us with a digital image drained of force and met with distrust. The halftone dots of the printed magazine lent the image a certain sense of reality. The digital image works the other way: with no grain and no dot, its very perfection is what empties it.

Does this betray a nihilistic truth laid bare, or an existential sorrow?

LuscoFusco's sculptures begin with printed images, handled physically and never zoomed in on: dots on a sheet of paper. A printed image does not vanish when we doubt it. It remains, with its weight and its defects, proof that it passed through a real, physical process. Each flaw is a crack, a call for the imagination to pass through. The synthetic image is too smooth and too plausible, born of codes with no physical origin. The copied print, by contrast, is flawed. It carries the flaws of earlier copies and gains new ones with each reproduction, yet it endures as a thing, gathering traces that lie beyond what it represents.

The sculptures devour this passage. In the work, the image-as-trace functions like a drafting code, the way a double line on an architectural plan stands for a wall. But the meaning of this code is never fixed. Like a game, it refuses to pin the trace to a single meaning, and authorship lies in the freedom to transform this code however desire takes it.”

Lucas Simões