The Eugénio de Almeida Foundation (FEA), based in Évora, announced that its exhibition will be open to visitors until October 19 at the institution’s Center for Art and Culture, located in the city’s acropolis.
The exhibition, titled ‘Believe’ and curated by Diogo Ramalho, is described as “the consolidation of David Infante’s extensive photographic journey, now reconfigured in an anthological format,” according to the organization.
An FEA representative stated that the exhibition will be displayed in the Rostrum Room of the Center for Art and Culture and will feature “a total of 21 photographs” by David Infante.
“Most of them are black and white, but some color works will also be on display,” the representative added.
Curator Diogo Ramalho noted that “David Infante’s work fragments into a broad universe of images, interconnected in a nearly hypertextual non-linearity.”
“As an artist, he resists today’s immediacy, offering a necessary continuity with traditional photography, using the most classical methods and techniques of the discipline,” he argued.
He continued, “by doing so, he removes any noise or dirt from his own time, giving timelessness to the images and focusing solely on their essence and the narratives they evoke.”
Infante, also quoted in the statement, said that the ‘Believe’ series to be presented in Évora emerges “as a form of confrontation, resistance, or even antithesis to the visual norms of contemporaneity.”
“Analog photography increasingly configures itself as a symbolic response to the speed and consumerist appetite of modernity, presenting itself as a place of memory where static bodies can have a permanent existence, an eternal present, and, in this way, attempt to combat the vertigo of immediacy,” he stated.
However, the artist added, “meanwhile, even this symbolic place has been invaded by another symptom of modernity, hyperconsumerism, where the digital photographic space has taken on an important part of this invasion.”
In the ‘Believe’ series, based on experimental analog photography, there is a constant search for the referential indices at its origin, such as the photographic referent or even the search within the spaces: the world ceases to be out there to be inside the photographs.
“This duality, this play of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ suggests that we analyze photographic spatiality to derive some consequences that allow us to understand photography beyond its surface,” the statement reads.
Thus, “the spatiality of David Infante’s photography becomes a Place that, in turn, invokes the idea of a place of thought,” the FEA summarized.
