What is out of sight
disturbs men's minds more seriously
than what they see

Gaius Julius Caesar
‍

Niklas Luhmann demonstrated in Social Systems, his most important book, how society as a whole evolves regardless of the desires of the individuals that comprise it. In theory, a hard pill to swallow for individual or class, and especially humanist, progressive aspirations. Communication connections between organizations and subsystems determine the whole. It is communication that communicates, not the individual. In a way, one loses control of a statement after uttering it. On the other hand, one is conditioned by prior rules and structures, not determined by them, to create communication with their acts. Therefore, a communication system is an integral part of a social system, which is in turn, its environment. Thus, a subsystem contributes to the organicity of the system it belongs to, without ever understanding it. The inaugural process of the communication production process to form a system is «selecção» [selection]. A subsystem, a company, for example, evolves by selecting a group of facts banished towards irrelevance from others it differentiates by. This positive selection, therefore, corresponds to a statement, to an interest other subsystems respond to. From here, and through simplifying, synthesizing, and abstracting, communication adapts itself to execution and production terminals. In summary: nothing human can be seen in this process. In any case, one can feel the powerful descriptions of the psychological sensation of alienation in Luhmann. The photographic eye fits in this problem as the widest and clearest form of subsystem selection, in the face of the system or environment that includes it.

Photography is the quintessential poetic-conceptual media. Rather than Luhmann adapting this media to system constructing, it was actually Kittler who did it, German as well. This technology philosopher characterizes modern discourse networks, more mediated every day, which are removed from a human to an autonomous sphere. Thus, and according to a long bibliography referencing from Benjamin, McLuhan, Flusser, Baudrillard to Crary, and even Kittler himself, photography corresponds to a determining factor in accelerating this autonomization, because it articulates this separation into two separate times: first, a photograph is «imediata» [immediate] in easily adhering vision to an apparent content; and second, it is «opaca» [opaque], since the ease of the apparent hinders accessing an understanding of what lies behind its production, i.e. how photography exists as a device. This is not, however, the place to deepen this argument. The artist and writer Gonçalo Pena merely mentioned so to point out that any approach to the work qualities of a photographer will always attempt to assess the underlying conception project of a selection process, and the relationship this process will have political questions, inherent to system producing, in summary, the significance of the technical awareness at hand.

Jorge das Neves presents three exhibition groups, with five photographs each, at the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, which correspond to two quite different approaches in terms of the concept. Two of the groups deal with memories, the first one through representing meaningful objects or places throughout the artistic and personal paths of Jorge das Neves; and the second consists of a documentation work about the venues of Anozero — Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra. The third group of photographs is radically different concept-wise. The negative space is used as raw material, as a text structured by a sequence of images. It is the space between two moments and places, or the selected, amplified, semantic distance between two different exhibitions. The negative space exhibitions follow on from object exhibitions in museums or libraries, emphasizing the structural game in this remarkable third instance of the exhibition by the photographer from the Island of Mozambique.

In returning to artistic work and exhibitions, the artist seemed to have an inner need to revisit Caldas da Rainha, where he got his artistic education, and where his last long-gone productions and exhibitions were held. A place where he was happy resurfaces bright in the darkness, barely traced, marked by collaborating with friends in the making of the projects. The materials and tools used back then lie unused in storage, where drawers add a morbid touch. The most important memory is summoned by two recently taken photographs of the same place. These photographs allude to a clearing where a pit used to be, an anti-volume used as a reference for projects. The hole, the negative space of a cube (negative-cube?), almost 10 feet long and nearly the same width, is long gone, just like the relationships from then are also long gone. The creation of the universe, the «poeira cósmica» [cosmic dust] shaped by a «let there be light» of streetlights, marks, perhaps ironically, the creative enthusiasm of those years similarly and contrarily to an evening party in a yard without anyone recalling that irretrievable absence of friendship. Indicating the importance of this beginning while also expressing a symbolic approach to photography, this group seems to close itself like a vanitas, a human skull made of stone by the photographer, wrapped up in a darkness similar to that of the previous photographs.

The second group of photographs, unlike the first, evokes a non-personal memory. It is also the least surprising group, in the sense that it follows one of the most frequent lines of artistic documentary work, i.e. a reporting on places and the past given by traces in these spaces. Some negatives were then selected from a photographic survey. Jorge das Neves offers debris and the remains from an architecture maquette, connected to the first and dark group of photographs, particularly to the photograph of the skull. Therefore, a ruin; an inevitability. Unlike the first, the three remaining photographs represent an interior overflowing with light. Out of these photographs, the most impressive, which in its composition is strong formalism-wise, presents a hospital curtain in its rail (since this venue was previously a health center), which hid the miseries of the body from outside eyes. However, nothing in this photograph hides, after years of ending the utility of this privacy guard. There is nothing to hide in this venue. Nevertheless, the folded curtain hauntingly underlines and announces every potential suffering of the body, simply by unfolding itself, falling on itself, and visually closing the place again.

The last group of five photographs regarding an argument presented by the artist and writer Gonçalo Pena at the beginning of this text is the most surprising and, in closing the exhibition, gives it a certain anthology feel. As Pena states, if the first two groups represent an approach of photography as media, the first in a confessional tone, the second in a more social tone, this third group presents photographic media itself as an integral part of the representation. Only in this third moment does photography suddenly transform into an object, indicating a relationship not only with space and the body but also with the gaze. In the face of these photographic objects, one does not read in-depth anymore, rather one establishes relationships on the surface, as if on a page. Selecting the negative space is clearly an investment in conceptual art, reflecting an abstraction of the history of the photograph, while at the same time recovering the sculpture formation, the tradition of ready-mades featured in other non-photographic productions. Representation spaces face each other: libraries against museums, classical art against different expressions, natural history museums against vandalism, this against that. Photography unframes itself and already tackles cinema, cutting, and editing. The selection process ceases to be purely visual and emotional, like in the first and second groups of photographs. However, it becomes intellectual and architectural instead, without losing a poetic sensibility in each selection moment. Despite opening a modern glade for media desacralization, it is still a somewhat formal approach, as if tearing up a set to return the machinery of the scene back to the public, the phantasmagoria that cinema uses to provoke astonishment. In summary, it is concluded by starting something important to be chased in the future, even beyond the modern. It is also by revisiting the possibilities and impossibilities of the past (since Jorge das Neves is not and has never been just a photographer), that this showing of a large scale is concluded. Merely a moment from a work about the materials of the photograph, beyond the photograph.

Gonçalo Pena