Antifaçade | Antifachada

This essay deals with the present time, with here and now, to conciliate the references of past and present, mixing them up by playing with identity and relationship. The set of images shows the complex and dynamic space of the contemporary metropolis. Despite the long and wide shots, BW requires an intensified concentration, since the details selected by the spectator will cause the visual and individual satisfaction. As if it was possible to bring the invocation of a distant gestalt of an explosive set, of strange meanings. ​ Sometimes, at first impression, the photographs seem o monolithic block, without any difference. But, as we look closer, we see that such apparent effect has a fascinating pattern, as it clearly shows the chaos and the formal differences between the buildings. Chaos and pattern dialectally connect themselves to cause a powerful visual effect when we are immersed in the image, trying to clearly see a tragic poetical horizon in its uselessness. ​ The idea of photographing the city sprung up long ago. But a lengthy lunch at the Bar do Léo followed by a tour through the old downtown, as a Baudelairian flâneur, during an afternoon that irradiated a special light, was necessary so that BW could see the beauty of a city that everybody seems to find ugly. As interesting beauty, new, able to cause a creative process and delineate an idea that was already pulsing, but burst out in a moment of intense perception. ​ BW’s São Paulo has no horizon, neither sky, nor ground. The lens squeezes the shots, the cropping highlights the rough superficies of the visual texture, and the image feeds itself with the total lack of photographic perspective. Misery and hugeness; possibility and impossibility; grandiloquence and atomicity; public and intimate. All is discerned through hundreds of windows present in the photographs, transforming us, in the apex of “Rear Window”, in amazed voyeurs in this wide ground of unequivocal visual abstraction. At the same time, the inhumanity of such way of living is shown: stacked on top of each other, without setting up links or articulations, thus isolated. BW radicalized the fictional possibility, transforming the city with intentionally oppressive and suffocating light. The city seems to explode in such claustrophobic space. And the tone of the images also was selected after several attempts to change the color of the image through computer. The primal idea was to show the city as if the air was rarefied, giving the feeling of oppression. An image inhospitable enough to iconize the critical situation of living in São Paulo. ​ Other important decision for the development of the work was the choice of the wide shot for the photographic blowups, which tried to break out our relationship with photography, through the amazing details that instigate our sensibility. Just as they cause amazement, the photographs show a scale that invades our consciousness and bring an experience which is not allowing us to create neither a feeling of sharing, nor of solidarity. The primal singularity totally alters our perception of space, letting us perplexed when we try to accept our perspective limits for the understanding of the contemporary urban form complexity. ​ Other differential in BW’s work stays in the fact that we are driven to inaccessible places, thanks to the audacity of trying to see the city through its unexplored places, those of difficult access. From this results the visual impact of such strategy, which presumes that the structure of the urban space can be broken apart by the each time more amazing scale of the city and through the constant abstraction of the understanding of urban processes and social relationships. ​ As we mindfully observe these photographs, was can verify how the city, randomly built, surprises us. In the innumerous windows of the buildings, we can verify that the inhabitants managed to solve their domestic issues. The clothes-lines, the bicycle, the parabolic antenna, the additions to the homes, the green spaces, the advertising spaces, the different styles, all together live free from the stigmata of an identity, in a dissonant harmony which is typical of São Paulo. ​ There is no unanimous agreement on what means to live in São Paulo. Paradoxically, in BW’s city, we do not see the terrible traffic jams, we do not discern the different smells, nor do we hear the noises proliferated into space. Only a devastating silence in the image of the cosmopolite city. Despites of the critical vision, the photographs point to a principle of architectural rationality in permanent conflict with the irrationality of the urban space construction. São Paulo seems to transform itself into a space of alienation and claustrophobic loneliness. ​ By photographing the city from this point of view, BW causes in us an unlimited ecstasy as he shows this perception of drawing born from this perverse logic. Our body, as wandering through the city, is not involved anymore by the streets and references that make him walk around and identify the space. The limits are imposed not only by the terrifying constructive scale, just as through a precise technique. BW creates a perfect essay, realist-minimalist, of the contemporary metropolis in its 450 years. In such flaming declaration to São Paulo, he proves not only the power of the image, but also makes emerge a strange feeling of displacement through which he can find again the beauty of this city, although hidden in the interstices of a paradoxically functional web. Nothing is explicit, as, contrasting with this almost sordid aridity, BW lets crop up the subtlety of his sight, which sees the city with a peculiar atmosphere, of nonachievement and permanent mutation. ​ Antifachada is a breakthrough essay paying homage to the city of São Paulo and, at once, it reconstructs the desire of seeing again some images living in the imaginary of the kid BW, who, at the beginning of the 1960s, in the district of Bom Retiro, saw the city as a mass of strange objects; cables, transformers, street lamps, high building seen from the bottom up, endless repetition of aligned windows. He believes that his perception of São Paulo as an oppressive and dominating city, and, at once, beautiful and seductive, arose at that moment, in which he registered everything in his unlimited imagination. Antifachada is a work deeply personal, of sharp perception that captures life in a differentiated flow; now that it has been transformed into this expressive, instigating essay, it does not pretend to investigate the city from the descriptive point of view, even less ideologize the city, but glorify it in its fullness: plural and spectacularized through photography.

Curated by

Bob Wolfenson@bob-wolfenson

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