The series Je t’aime moi non plus, to which these images belong, is formally identical to Grand Tourism where the artist appropriated a group of postcards from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but this time, instead of choosing touristic sights – recognizable after the thorough exam of a more lingering look at the images – the series theme is summertime bathing resorts.

Beginning with the re-photographing of postcards, the author darkens the entire image almost completely with only the exception of a detail (a human figure), which captures the viewers’ attention in the very first instance.

Then it is the hiding which forces a more attentive look, even though revealing some transparency, so that one can understand the landscape featuring the detached character. And it is precisely in that lingering look where the essence of the series is to be found, in a work that seeks to question the perception and the mode by which clear/dark, or unveiled/veiled, function side by side in the discovery of an image.

The apparent nonsense of the answer me neither to the statement I love you, in the series title, is a provocation that works as breaking point in the coherence of a discourse which simultaneously invokes denial and affirmation as complementary faces of the same reality. In formal terms, one could invoke the occultations in Indian ink and gouache that Fernando Azevedo made on photographic images printed in the 1950s, as a precursor of this kind of technique, or otherwise find a metaphor in the images for the physiological mechanism of peripheral and central vision – which precisely distinguishes colour and detail in the area where our eyes are fixed, so that, at the periphery, it only accounts for the changes in light intensity. Yet, it is perhaps in the invocation of memory – as a mechanism where the dimension of real will gradually dilute (forgetting, hiding) – that the reference to the logic of fragment and to reception strategies makes sense in this case, acting as signification processes in the series of images.

JO
November 2011