Armando FERRAZ (1968)

Armando Ferraz was born in 1968 in Lisbon. He studied Painting at the Escola de Belas-Artes do Porto (School of Fine Arts of Oporto) and is a contemporary of a group of creators gathered together by the magazine Confissões do Exílio (Confessions from Exile). During his artistic career Armando Ferraz has chosen to construct objects, manipulate images, take photographs, and make videos, which he shows simultaneously in his exhibitions. These have been marked by a fictional approach to reality, constructed with parallel languages from cinema, television, photography, and design.

This fictional character of the real is the result of a technique that starts with the deconstruction of the most obvious discourses established by systems of social order and control. The fictional feeling of reality that we find in Ferraz’s images is presented by the de-contextualisation produced between the places and the subjects that he creates. However, this fictional process is never totally separate from real, social, or psychological data that his creative process is founded on. The fictional character is, rather, the basis of the transposition from the real, a path to hyperrealism. In his creative process the artist moves away from and breaks with the standard aesthetic real. Thus, this de-contextualisation allows for a more profound reflection on the structures of the real than we subject ourselves to.

The two photographs by Armando Ferraz that belong to the Collection of the Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão are representative of his work. They belong to a photographic series Azul e Rotineiro (Blue and the Routined) that was selectively exhibited in the main building of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in the show 7 Artistas ao 10.º Mês (Seven Artists in the Tenth Month), in 2001.

Ferraz’s photographic process normally involves constructing a stage set, or choosing a space with the necessary conditions for an imagined set. In the act of taking the photograph, there is no instantaneous movement interacting with the real. For Ferraz, photographing is a process of the maturation of personal experiences, and of understanding cultural environments, which are given to us via indirect signs without a documentary value.
 
For this reason the artist is interested in the validity of a projected work by subject. The subjects represented are, in part, involved in disclosing the photographer as well as anonymous subjects that complement but never reduce each other. The images allow anyone to recognise themselves in the photographic environment. The subjects have a representative function and are never treated as real beings. Rather, the illustrative character of their actions reduces them to elements of a set, at the same level as all the other elements that compose the image. In this sense Ferraz’s photography negates the positivist sentimentalism of the humanist tradition, which had a faith in the subject, and in the subject’s gaze. This faith has always determined the action and was the reason for the photographic act. In contrast, in Ferraz’s photographs there is an emptying of the gaze. His work does not aspire to any sort of revelation of, or testimony to, the truth. The traditional understanding of photography that is supported by the illusion of photographic mimesis, permits that a particular moment would have a universal character that ultimately would guarantee moral order. The fictional character of Ferraz’s images questions this understanding of condensing time to an essential moment of action, and favors instead the illusion of the collapse of time, which destabilises any totalizing view of the image. This process is emphasised by the use of a technique of constructing the real that is decentralised, fragmented, or partial. The relativism regarding the meaning of the signs neutralises the absolute truth by contradicting the foundations of the modernist edifice, of which photography was one of the main builders. Armando Ferraz’s photographs do not run the risk of caricature, because they are not restricted to a concrete space and time, and they do not establish a limit to meaning. The subjects inscribed in his work do not formulate a reductionist commentary of the real that they inhabit. Instead, they are completely open and create a space for the existence of the other; they search for other subjects which they try to identify with. In this sense his photography establishes an aesthetic of proximity that is simultaneously a theory of wandering.

FRANCISCO VAZ FERNANDES