From 23rd July to 30th December, visit Fernando Penim Redondo’s photography exhibition, Retro Visão – A return to the machines and photographic rolls of the 20th century, which will be on display at the Loures Municipal Archive.
The direction of the human gaze, through the lens of the machine, selects and cuts out in a given space, through a single instant, the capture of a fragment of time, the moment. At that moment, Walter Benjamin, essayist and literary critic, called it aura.
The Benjaminian aura, instituted as a profile of the real, is what gives the artistic object its distinction and the value of art. The aura has become a product of memory that we want to reactivate and that escapes our perception of the current world.
The reproduction of the work of art always lacks its hic et nunc – its unique here and now; its aura that exists by itself as a phenomenon of reception and perception of the individual.
With photography and its revolutionary mode of reproduction, art approaches the crisis with mechanized reproduction, but “it emancipates the work of art from its parasitic existence in ritual. The reproduced work of art becomes the reproduction of a work of art destined for reproducibility”.
Fernando Penim Redondo’s exhibition will explain how easy mechanization and accessible reproduction attract the public more than the artwork, determined by the imminent, rapid and replaceable multiplication of the image that ‘penetrates’ and dissects more sharply the reality.
Camera, lenses and image treatment provide rhythms of approximation, distance, isolation, focus and enlargements in an attractive and seductive speed, with image and photography determined by their reproducibility, as well as updated by their reproduction and tendency to dissolve the aura.
This exhibition raises the question of whether the photographed work of art is art and whether its reproduction is not. Photography aspires to the work of art if it includes the hic et nunc (aura) in itself, pushing the replica away and moving towards the unique, the total, through the photographer’s chosen and cropped gaze.
Retro Visão – A return to the machines and photographic rolls of the 20th century can be visited at the Municipal Archive, located at Rua Cesário Verde, in Loures, from July 23rd to December 30th, 2021, between 9:00 am and 12:30 pm and 2:00 pm and at 5:00 pm.
Entrance is free, but subject to reservation, through the email archive_municipal@cm-loures.pt or the telephones 211 150 755 | 211 150 756, and the recommendations of the Directorate-General for Health (DGS).
@ CM Loures
