The Rate of Converge of Two Opposing System Trajectories

Galeria Graça Brandão (Lisboa)
Edgar Martins : The Rate of Converge of Two Opposing System Trajectories

In order to reach the gallery Graça Brandão, in Lisbon, located in one of the many historic districts in the city, it is necessary to go through cafés and taverns. Places embedded between designer shops and private homes that during the night become bars and fado houses. We walk through and crossing homely streets to get to a former warehouse, once used by one of the many newspapers that existed in Portugal in the last century, now transformed into an exhibition space for contemporary art.

Completely integrated in this reality, the gallery has always been at the heart of sensory experiences. It is enveloped in the sounds coming from many rehearsal rooms at the nearby music conservatory. While inside the exhibition space, we chance upon remnants of a fruit market, the smell of apples – a reference we find too vulgar, as if the gas from the fruit would speed up the ripening of the images presented at the exhibition The Rate of Converge of Two Opposing System Trajectories, by Edgar Martins.

Some of the photographs presented are part of the series Ruins of the Gilded Age. Journalism issues aside, there has always been a too specific link between the images digitally manipulated by the author, even in previous series like Topologies, and the writing of Guy Debord, about the society of spectacle: “The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself”.

Two orders are confronted: the photographic series in which it includes the image of a room at 14 Baldwin Farms South, Greenwich, Conn. (the photo displayed at the gallery is different from the digitally altered imaged shown in the north-American newspaper, and from that was originally photographed by the author), and the series that gives title to the exhibitions, The Rate of Converge of Two Opposing System Trajectories, where debris left inside empty buildings are constructed and appear as pure forms, such as in False Imprisonment or Untouchable, both from 2008.

In the revelation of the false move, reality in the “blackmail accounts for the general acceptance of the illusion at the heart of the consumption of modern” economy, in which the spectacle is the common manifestation that can be found on the way to gallery.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXVIII, Núm. 258 (88), December 2009 España © Edgar Martins, "Untitled (Phoenix, Arizona)", from the series "Ruins of the Gilded Age", 2008