On the one hand the scenes on the other, the characters. Everything is on black and white, but separated. PARADIGMS gallery promotes this time the meeting of two photographers: the Brazilian Cláudio Versiani and the Catalan Luis Plana del Llano. Two travellers. Two artists with eyes trained on framing, on the light and on the contextualization of the spaces and people that make it up.

Throughout his life, Luis Plana has travelled around the world photographing representations of characters that, for one reason or another, are historical references, displayed in museums in different cities. No matter their names, ages and backgrounds. He now brings them to Paradigms as a collection of ‘revived’, a gallery of portraits of people that sounds us, but we can’t remember from where. Plana, in a sharply contemporary attitude, decontextualizes and appropriates the work of others to create his own. The traveller reframes the human representations made on stone in another times to allow us to approach the expressions and feelings that his lone eyes have found in statues around the world. The sculptures look like free of his impassivity and seem updated, as the poet Federico Valenciano writes in his foreword to the exhibition.

Versiani professional journalist, in his Human Landscapes serie, crosses the border of documentary to build scenes that were already there, but couldn’t be seen without his trained eye, according to Graça Ramos,  curator of the exhibition. Versiani deals with scales and attempts to “show the actual size of a human being in relation to the earth.” Crossing continents, he frames the movement of people both in big cities like Chicago and New York, in the United States, as in small ones like Monsaraz and Óbidos in Portugal. His images “are poetically lush, showing a strong dose of emotional involvement in the construction of his narrative strategy,” said Ramos. In eight photos in large format, we can see an example of how the artist is spying on people in their cities to make “a dramatization of the inherent solitude in human existence.”

Opening: July 19th. The exhibition continues until August 19th.

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