José Maçãs de Carvalho's whole oeuvre is closely connected with the issue of archives and its related notions of memory, perception, time and space experience. Through photography and video, he develops the concepts of elliptic repetition, sequence and good neighbourliness of similar yet different images. This practice reflects his cinematic, poetic and Warburgian understanding of culture and memory as dynamic processes rather than frozen webs and grids. Constantly, the artist conjures up the latent expressiveness of stored images of the past, giving them back the contemporaneousness of their existence.

The present reality-anchored series of photographs feature a repeated urban landscape shot from Macau's Wynn Casino-Hotel. Standing on the opposite bank of the river, towers and buildings compose the background of the image. Passing viewers, seen from behind and standing in backlight, appear at the forefront. Their number and density vary from image to image, as well as the light intensity, creating a sensation of movement and passage of time. An imposing digital billboard, scrolling short films of luxury brands, is boldly illuminated with red bright lines whose role is to emphasise the central screen. Magnifying the names associated with high living standards and commodity fetishism, the advertisement commands the attention. Its condensed warm lights and flashing words produce a striking visual contrast with the gloomy atmosphere dominated by shades of black and grey.

This series enlightens the tensions between the visible and the unseen, stillness and movement, repetition and variation, fixity and transience, sameness and otherness. Within still and falsely identical framed images, it is through difference, but also through what exceeds the boundaries that movement, novelty and query is produced, simultaneously revealing the moving and subjective nature of perception. Despite the absence of narrative new meanings spur through repetition, unanticipated linkages and details.

KS