From his stay in New York, where he worked as a decorator on the Portuguese pavilion at the international exhibition that took place in 1939, under the slogan World of Tomorrow, Emmerico Hartwich Nunes has left us this artistic view of the Art Deco skyscraper Williamsburgh Savings Bank. Built between 1927 and 1929, it remains to this date the tallest building in Brooklyn. Unlike in Manhattan, where similar buildings are crammed together, the “Willie” single-handedly dominates a centre where the worlds of business, culture and entertainment traditionally mix together.

Revisiting the theme of photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s City of Ambition (1910), and using an identical staging of New York architecture, Emmerico Hartwich Nunes develops a foreground of human-scale buildings, highlighted with warm colours, that opens out to a grey landscape punctuated by the majestic and unreal skyscraper. To the chromatic vibrations of the urban atmosphere captured by Carlos Botelho, who worked with him on the same exhibition, Emmerico prefers the silence of the snow that muffles the visual and sonic rumblings of the city and helps to define both the rationality and the volumetric radicalism of the sentinels that trace the city's skyline.

ILC

January 2011