Umbra

Photobook by David Gonçalves
Published by Opera Omnia

The Image’s Silence

“There won’t be redeemed through the image, everything there is to be said sums up to the enunciation’s potential — the silence. When everything tends to convert itself into the brand of the trade of souls, when the creative act together with its urgent resistance is looked upon with mistrust or these functional for the notorious “creation of value”, David Gonçalves’s photographs place us before the world’s bareness. Nothing to say, little to be contemplated, simply time, without remorse or sacrifice, the painless event’s assumption, an unpredictable void — time’s suspension, judgment’s suspension, an absent ruin, objects which no feeling can relate to. Of the artist, there’s no moral reflection on loss, or wound, all that is, is rarefied by the shot, a little left, just that immediate sound, the dead animal falling into the savannah’s ground, or the mosquitoes buzzing electrified in the precise instant it directs itself into the light.

What is essential takes back its place, doesn’t originate within the image as a double, it shows itself whole, nor a model or an in-between, not even a shadow that’s immanent. Before or after will be a shadow for these pictures, although distance and absence give way to the possibility of a real with no double. The light-dark that we see within them is simply the reality’s own matter — not a representation — it’s not possible to represent what, by itself, can’t be heard naturally, even less document it. The real is not susceptible to documentation, that’s an obsession that comes from a time whose illusion of retaining an archive leads it to the death’s threshold.

What’s in the world, and that we rarely see or hear, is just a black surface, the same that grants depth and authenticity to that modeled by light, captured by the not discrete David Gonçalves’s camera. All that there’s left are ways to make a living (to some, to lose it!), between shining objects, and that feared playing the world as a checkers game. In the best of chances, the truth as a prayer (the truth… the word that establishes terror!) inhabits the undermost between the bright and dark houses in a game’s board, that is, the stage of what we commonly call life.”

Text by José Carlos Francisco Pereira

48 pages
170×240 cm