Felizardo, below and beyond the moderns

DATE: 2023.11.20

AUTORIA: Luiz Carlos Rosa Felizardo

BIO: Luiz Carlos Rosa Felizardo, was born in 1949 in the city of Porto Alegre, RS, where he lives. During the Faculty of Architecture, which began in 1968 at UFRGS, he began working professionally as an advertising photographer. He then starts photographing the urban, rural and natural landscape of his home state. The photographer used large format cameras in his photographs, following the tradition of modern American photography. His black and white images, with great clarity, present a rich range of gray tones and redesign the landscape. For a year he lived in the United States in the city of Prescott (he was a Capes and Fulbright scholarship holder). In the North American period, he was mentored by photographer Frederick Sommer (1905-1999). In 1990 he was awarded a scholarship from the Vitae Foundation to carry out research work on his mentor in the United States. Luiz Felizardo participated in numerous exhibitions, including group and individual shows in Brazil and abroad, Masp, MAM, Margs are some examples. Felizardo's work is present in museum collections in Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, the United States, as well as private collections in Brazil, the USA and Europe. He wrote the books “O Relógio de Ver” and “IMAGO. In addition to being an artist photographer, Luiz Felizardo carries out an astute photographic critique in his writings.

On a hot night in July 2023, I visited photographer Luiz Carlos Felizardo (1949, RS) in his apartment in Porto Alegre. I was received by Isabel, his wife, and him. At the entrance, the enchantment of the space captured me. Photographic works of art spread across the walls and my intoxicated gaze took in everything. Felizardo worked on his computer together with Marco Antônio Filho, artist and photographer, who currently helps him organize his vast photographic material. I sat next to them, we started talking and a magical field created by unknown affections was connecting us. I saw in the images that followed each other all the references that enchanted and enchanted me and that, in a way, also shaped my perspective. Felizardo, like few others, in tune with the spirit of the time, knew how to transform the Modern knowledge he received into an original look at the world around him. I would say to detect in the images seen something of a surrealist and deeply existential aspect with echoes of a great silence and emptiness. Its fields, views, shapes, objects and cities reminded me of Eugene Atget (1857-1927), a French photographer from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The images captured by Atget portray a silent and empty Paris and its surroundings where the human figure is almost always absent and, the common, the ordinary paradoxically gain a kind of aura in the affront that modernity makes through the gesture of the photographer's choice. His work, for many artists and photographers of his time, such as Man Ray, Berenice Abbot, among others, holds the germ of the coming surrealism.

I draw this parallel with Atget because I find in the images selected here by Felizardo, the same echo and emptiness that permeates the work of the first so-called surrealist photographer. The subtle perception of things in their existential rawness is captured by Felizardo with the same documentary mastery as his French predecessor. In this game perpetrated by the gaze, object and environment become independent of human presence, rendered superfluous and unnecessary. What was just a document, emerges on a new level of existence allowing all the poetry of the form to emerge in shades of grey, black and white and, like an old piano tired of old melodies, it decides to improvise. Quoting Walter Benjamin, when referring to Atget, who was also an actor, “he cleared his mask and dedicated himself to unmasking reality” (Benjamin, 2012: 106), a reality that is always subjective and changeable. It seems to me that in the inflection and curvature that I make here in Luiz Felizardo's work, it is this demystification that can be observed in this intriguing image world offered to us. It doesn't matter the temporal location of what is photographed, what matters is what is proposed to us through the image, which affects others through the experience of looking.

As a provocation, I open Luiz Felizardo's portfolio with the image of a couple looking at each other, an image that is mirrored in the glass where one of them leans. The couple seems oblivious to their surroundings. Apparently in love, they suggest seeing only what is reflected in the other's eyes, oneself. Still teasing, I close the portfolio with the image of the greyhound. The animal, in an untimely cut, recalls the image of Ouroboros, a mythological creature, a type of serpent that, according to interpretations, breaks with linear evolution and evokes the wheel of existence, a solar symbol in most traditions. In Buddhism, for example, Ouroboros means looking at oneself as a way of evolving spiritually, marked by the absence of beginning and end. In other words, Felizardo invites us to leave the sameness, tells us about the other, about difference, about the noise to be sought in silence and the presence to be sought in the void. His gesture, for me surrealist-inspired, seeks to show us a path of reconnection in a world populated by absence, where Time incessantly regurgitates the past and the present. These images are waiting places.