Glória Ferreira
REMNANT RECOVERY
Renato Bezerra de Mello carries out his work within a universe of memories, copies and reproductions, making up something we might call a “fictional memory”. The artist comes from a large, well-known Northeastern Brazilian family, and Visionaries is composed of photographs prospected from his family albums. No genealogy is provided, however. Who is the aunt, the grandfather, the cousin, the aunt’s godmother?
The portrait Baudelaire called a ‘narcissistic mirror’ was the basis for photography’s first great moment of expansion, on everything from visiting cards to identification cards. An identification that is official (a representation which insures that, as Louis Morin points out to us, in our own presence we are ourselves) and that constructs an omnipresent past (likewise a mirror, with its subjective inferences). In Visionaries, the reproduction of portraits in black and white slides (positive, transparent…) homogenizes them on an equal scale – that of monocles. The way proposed for viewing them is random. We move from one to another as if across a map devoid of coordinates. If maps construct more than reality represents, thus allowing meaning to circulate, the play between showing and hiding deprives photography of that which it would ostensibly reinforce about what, from its dawn, would be the fate of images: making absence present. No doubt a game inherent to representation, albeit one in which, through the subtraction of all verbal information, the reconstructed, familiar memory becomes fiction.
O retrato, esse espelho narcísico como acusava Baudelaire, foi a base do primeiro grande momento de expansão da fotografia, das cartas de visita às carteiras de identificação. Identidade tanto oficial, representação que assegura, como assinala Louis Marin, que em nossa própria presença somos nós mesmos, quanto da construção de um passado onipresente, espelho igualmente, com suas ilações subjetivas. Em Visionaries, a reprodução dos retratos em slides em preto e branco (positivos, transparentes…) uniformiza-os em uma mesma escala: a dos monóculos. O caminho proposto para visioná-los é aleatório. Passamos de um para o outro como em um mapa sem coordenadas. Se o mapa constrói mais do que representa o real e, assim, faz circularem as significações, o jogo entre mostrar e ocultar priva a fotografia do que supostamente ela viria reforçar em relação ao que, desde seus primórdios, seria o destino das imagens: tornar presente a ausência. Jogo, sem dúvida, inerente à representação, mas na qual, pela subtração de qualquer informação verbal, a memória familiar reconstruída se torna ficção.
In its intricate relationship with presence, absence also subsumes the presentation of I am both father and friend. These are letters from the artist’s grandfather, Colonel Othon, to a son who was away in the United States during the 1940s and who subsequently gave them to Renato, his only son, as a treasure never to be disclosed.
The operational device of both works shares common features which, in a way, permeate the artist’s production. The poetic investigation of memory and recollection, as well as traces of the history of human action are equally present, for instance, in his embroideries of the names of people who served him or his family, or even of intersecting rivers in an imaginary river basin – boundary-less territories, geographies without location, non-linear histories.
The fifty or so letters, typewritten by Renato on a German typewriter that he found on a Parisian street (like the monocles, even the technical means which the artist has found bear the mark of memory…) are addressed to his sisters. Five copies have been reproduced through the use of carbon paper, the form under which they are presented. If, as an instrument of reproduction, carbon has fallen into near-disuse, as a graphic element it evokes writing, through graphite, and treasure, as diamond, as well as its chain of relationships in all organic substances, thus rendering symbolic reverberations present, including those of the new chain of relatives who will look after the treasures from now on. However, although it has been revealed, the secret remains, where the keys of the old Zimmermann have punched through to allow us to decipher the words of the letters/icons, establishing a permanent back and forth movement between the legible and the visible. Renato hails from Recife – where he is presenting these works for the first time in Brazil – a city in which his family, the frame and substratum of his work, remains a reference. Photographs of his ancestors, for instance, are reproduced in the book O Retrato Brasileiro [The Brazilian Portrait]. According to Gilberto Freyre, they are documents of socio-photography, since they are socio-cultural as well as physical and anthropological.
[1] Repentistas and cordelistas are, respectively, musical duelists and storytellers, performers who sing and writers who hawk their rhymed stories in marketplaces throughout the Brazilian Northeast.