Nuno CERA (1972)

Nuno Cera was born in Beja in 1972. Although he has a degree in Advertising from IADE, his daily practice as a photographer has defined his artistic course. Cera was a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholar at the Musée Nicéphore Nièpce and at Jetlag Lx Macau in 1999. His period in Berlin as a residing artist in 2001 (“João Hogan” scholarship, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) was a decisive step towards the development of his career. From then on, Cera has divided his activity between the cities of Lisbon and Berlin. His recent incursion into the field of cinema can be understood in light of the concerns highlighted in his photo-based work.
 Nuno Cera’s photographs challenge the ideas of the stationary, of frontality and the pose. The idea of travel or movement is the undercurrent theme developed in his work. Cera’s gaze carefully selects the planes where the lines of passage or vanishing points disclose the orientation of his visual understanding. These lines are located in the most immediate urban contexts, such as highways, tunnels or railway lines and, to a different extent, the marks left by aeroplanes as they cross the sky, shooting stars, or even the movement of the sun through leaves, and the definition of trails and paths through the forest.
 
In the series of photographs The Corridors, 2001 (Corridors– 6, CAMJAP col.), 6 narrow paths, with no way out in sight, anonymous corridors found by happenstance in large cities, appear portrayed. The deliberate repletion of the framing, always fixed at the same angle, places the inevitable vanishing point into perspective– an empty path leading to an unknown place. Destined to be crossed, these bare corridors suggest human presence. The figures that appear in his work are also transcribed in this same dynamic. Even though each presence can be identified, and the idea of the pose underlies the setting up of each action, they can hardly be termed portraits. In fact, these figures drift, or are in some state of unindividuated physical or psychological movement.

Nuno Cera seeks to capture the instantaneous nature of a gesture without rendering the meaning or dramatic content of these signs. Even when the suggestion of narrative seems to arise, for instance in the series Everything Must Go (2002), portraying several women surprised in weeping, Cera’s work deals with a moment of transition.

After a decade of photography, Nuno Cera directed his first film in a project conceived during his residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. This experience also corresponds to his first exhibition outside of Europe (I-20 Gallery, New York, 2003). Berlin, a Super 8 film, made with 4200 photographs, enabled him to visually experience some of the possible relations between photography and cinema. In this work, Cera aimed at capturing the concept of a global city with fragmentary images, concentrating time and space in the expression of the cosmopolitan pulsation with sudden and recurring changes of speed.

Between the artist and the city gone character, there is hardly any place for intermediaries, narrative mediators or other interpretative content. In NYC (2003), the city of New York is the object of an identical approach, filmed as an autonomous body moving in vertiginous arrhythmia. The artist’s gaze also discloses his skill at swiftly roving through spaces of passage – tunnels and roads – or transforming different architectonic masses into volumes that cross space.

Passage can be seen as a whole or as a fragment in Nuno Cera’s work. There is a permanent flow of images between his films and photographs, a systematic act of reconnaissance and an inevitable space of cross-fertilisation. Recalling the sense of his photography, one can always think of cinema as a natural sequence, or even destination.

In 2003, Nuno Cera was selected by an international jury to participate in the Fair Play festival at the Play Gallery for Still and Motion Pictures in Berlin (consisting of emerging artists working in the fields of video-art, cinema and animation), serving to confirm his growing international repute in his chosen field.

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