Umbra (2018)
The Image’s Silence
There won’t be redemption 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 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, judgement’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, little left, just that immediate sound, the dead animal falling into the savannah’s
ground, or the mosquito’s buzzing electrified in the precise instant it directs itself into the light.
What is essential takes back its place, doesn’t originates 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 a 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 modelled 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.
José Carlos Francisco Pereira
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