The subtitle of the image (Photograph of a Sculpture) refers to the fact that the artist placed a four metre tall street-light, and a generator to light it, on this navigational buoy/island in the Tejo River, thus creating an intervention in the landscape which could be regarded as a site-specific installation.

 

This, however, was not the artist’s intention. This sculpture, as Rui Moreira refers to it, is part of a larger group of seven sculptures, installed in different locations and developed over a period of four years, which were designed specifically to be photographed as part of the artist’s investigation of this method of representation. A post box perched on a wooden post three metres high in a rural landscape, or an eight-metre high iron staircase resembling a diving board, installed in an industrial landscape, are two further examples of these sculptures by Rui Moreira.*

 

What does the photograph add to the sculpture? How does the landscape, in which the sculpture is placed, interact with the artist’s work to create a particular form of visibility through the image? The images effectively represent landscapes, yet the landscapes serve as a backdrop for an intervention by the artist, which through photography is transformed into a metaphor.

 

In Via Lactea I, this metaphor is understood through the relationship between all the elements that make up the image: the verticality of the street light, the diffuse light of a city through the fog, the ‘island’ and the luminous intervention on it, the skewed horizon line, nothing is the result of chance. The photograph is not a result of the a lack of technical expertise; all the directorial decisions (choice of day and hour, framing, point of view, position of the fog, etc.) were made by the artist and shared with the photographer Colin Paulson.

 

For Rui Moreira, these landscapes need not be named or identified, corresponding as they do to internal, intimate landscapes. They are states of soul, they represent equivalents of personal experiences which have found in the sculpture and the photograph a way to codify this private vocabulary.

 

 

* See Nuno Faria e Jorge Molder (texts), Os Últimos Dias: Desenhos de Alexandre Conefrey, Paulo Brighenti, Rui Moreira, Rui Vasconcelos, Lisbon: CAM/FCG, 2000, p. 34 e 36.

 

 

 

JO

 

November 2011