The Portuguese photography collection at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation includes another work by Fernando Lemos with this title – Garden (inv. FP186). This photograph was produced from the same negative, although the image is inverted horizontally here and the proof is presented as a negative print, in a kind of anti-form of the other image with which it shares a title.

However, neither of the two photographs shows the garden or the tree. We can only make an inference based on the shadow and light, as well as the name of the place where Lemos took the image, the garden of São Pedro de Alcântara in Lisbon.

This is not a common procedure in Fernando Lemos’ practice, but on occasion the artist explores this technical mediation of the print in negative as yet another possibility for discovering meanings and forms veiled between chance and determination, thus making viable new narrative dimensions. It is a research process that emerged to a degree in the wake of the surrealist photograms, although those used objects (often arranged at random) on top of photographic paper.

José Oliveira
2022