Location: Ex-Cavallerizza, Piazzale Giuseppe Verdi
DON’T LIE TO ME — PAULO COQUEIRO
Curated by Alejandra Hernández Muñoz.
The border between reality and fiction is nothing new. It has always flourished in the arts. The scope of characters, narratives, times and dimensions bring us closer and connects us with intangible spiritual, philosophical and aesthetic plans. But what is the boundary between creation and post-truth? This work constitutes a place where documentary and invention are confused to reflect on the scope of the image and appearances. It could be said that we are facing an anti-fable…
“Don’t lie to me” uses fiction as a way to stimulate the senses and uses the photographic image as a language. Tito Ferraz is a character, heteronym of the photographer, alter-ego of the artist. It is the photograph that reveals his absence. More broadly, Tito Ferraz could be an icon of the invisible anonymous of the statistics on disappearances, a sign of the excluded in Brazil whose existence only emerges in art. The whole process of this work is a contemporary photographic view that problematises and multiplies aspects and appearances, which expresses the sensitive and the intangible. The tension between what (apparently) is and how (apparently) it happens and mixes allusion and illusion.
In Brazil immersed in rumours, fake-news, convictions without evidence and unprecedented manipulation of public opinion Tito Ferraz is an indication of the post-truth era, the fragility of our critical capacity and the power of appearances. According to Barthes, the image precedes the thing. Paradoxically, the photograph here records something unrepresentable, documents the nonexistent.
