André Cepeda

At the base of vision

André Cepeda likes to look around, to wander through familiar places and explore their semantic and aesthetic reverberations. The city where he lives, Porto, has been his privileged setting, often to signal border territories, marginal and exclusion zones, seen by the artist in their spatial and material peculiarity but also as symptoms of historical conditions, as fragments of a geography constrained by (social, political, and moral) hierarchies that prevent any type of communitarian cohesion or convergence.
The images in Depois ("After") date mainly from the last two years. Throughout this period, Cepeda strolled through various areas of the city, particularly at night, when the urban rhythm slows and movement (machines, people, language) abates. This is when life simulates its own suspension, as if transformed into a photograph.  The collection of images suggests a physical – and mental – journey through various sites in a city where human presence has been suspended. During this journey, this meander, André Cepeda photographs a wide range of subjects, including deserted streets, the façades of buildings, rudimentary constructions, monuments, ruins, and abandoned materials and objects in settings permeated by melancholy and a sense of emptiness, where nothing appears to happen. It is a view that is harsh and sensitive, meditative and critical, which reacts to space, matter, and light, bestowing certain places and objects with a character that is at once familiar and strange, banal and mysterious.
As with most of his previous work, these images fall outside the category of photography that embraces everyday moments and sudden fleeting gestures, elements that inspire a significant body of urban photography.  At the same time, it is not photography that seeks a generic, distant, cold, and abstract representation of the city.  On the contrary, in André Cepeda's photography there is a clear intention to work according to a principle of territorial intimacy, to borrow Jean-François Chevrier's apt expression, an approach based on a productive connection between a (spatial, experiential, and ethical) relationship with the subject matter and the analytical and speculative possibilities that the image offers.
In these photographs, the places tend to be depicted according to a more specific rather than general perspective.  There is a sense that the artist favours scenes that are devoid of human presence, as if an oblique movement towards a paradoxical and distended space-time were necessary, immune to the concrete nature of gestures and actions, so that a particular city, a particular time, a particular state of things, may be discerned and examined in all its breadth and complexity.    
Cepeda is interested in places within the (his) city as both a theme and a singular domain of perceptions, like two completely indivisible dimensions that confirm the existence of a fundamental relationship between seeing and reality, as if reality did not exist without the vision that forms and frames it. Consequently, there is a clear intention on Cepeda's part to establish a consistent and fertile congruence between the type of place and the type of photographic approach. There is an apparent preference for an approach that resembles the formal parameters of documentary photography, as a genre that values the descriptive, objective, and realistic qualities of photographic representation; in other words that is primarily motivated by technical precision, clear and precise image construction, and the rejection of any type of pictorial expressionism. As such, the images aim to redefine the meaning of photography, since they aspire to be no more or no less than photographic images, taking as a given the extraordinary capacity of the camera to heightening our awareness and perception of what surrounds us.  
However, a more thorough analysis of André Cepeda's photographs reveals that they are not entirely documentary, much less objective, by virtue of their rhetoric of marrying descriptive competence with the speculative, aesthetic, and redefining power of the image. Thus, it can simply be said that André Cepeda departs from objective image conventions in order to attain a more extensive and fruitful subjectivity. His images are unstable and transitory, which is unquestionably a quality because it fulfils one of the main expectations of artistic practice, the opportunity for a view that is different, extensive, and "obtuse" (according to the meaning attributed by Roland Barthes), capable of arousing something in the viewer that which is more subjective, intuitive, and projective. In André Cepeda's photographs, the documented referent, the concrete subject, the here and now of the image, is not the central element. One has to reflect on what the image arouses, on its presence value, on the resonance it creates.   They are images that have an impact at the level of reception, as a peculiar block of space-time, reminding us, as Thierry De Duve remarked, "that owing to its indexical nature, the photographic sign cannot be subject to semiotic analysis without the phenomenological or even the existential getting stuck to its skin, so to speak. In the image of the real transformed into surface, not only as a reference, over there, but also as existence, here."
Most of these photographs stand out for their naked simplicity. It is as if the subjects present themselves, without any artistic mediation.  The coldness and precision of the photographic record and the meticulousness of the image composition are, therefore, means that are given to underscoring the limitations and paradoxes of photography itself, in the sense of an interpretation that is not enclosed within the boundaries of the image, like a play on uncertainties that invites the spectator to reflect on other key issues within our collective and individual conscience.  In this way, André Cepeda's images remind us that, as spectators, we do not passively gaze; on the contrary, we are also (or above all) visual producers.
It is a direct and forthright contemplation that avoids obvious aestheticisms or formalisms and that subsumes an ethical and aesthetic stance: ethical because it rejects any grading of moral and social values; aesthetic because it dismisses thematic, symbolic, and artistic hierarchies, fully adhering to the idea that everything is a subject for photography. Thus, far from being an objective and rational approach, experiencing André Cepeda's photographic vision is akin to embarking on a sensitive and subjective exploration that awakens a new and immensely rich perception capable of demonstrating variations and oscillations in the appearance of things, frequently playing with the differences and tensions between figuration and abstraction, as can be seen in the diptych formed by two black and white photographs: on the one hand, an orthogonal view of part of the façade of a building with a reticular design; on the other hand, a photograph of a wall with a shapeless black stain, probably smoke marks accumulated over several years. Then there is the photograph of various fluorescent lights on a wooden counter or the image of a decorative detail on a concrete wall at the entrance to a building. Walls, architectural features, and objects are represented in such a way that they appear like drawings or sculptures.  In these cases, the intuitive and “visual” gaze demanded by a drawing (as an experience of forms) or a sculpture (in its focus on material, volume, and weight) appears to be foremost in the photographer's mind, as a creative inference in this kind of plot that Cepeda weaves into ordinary yet alien places, between impenetrable darkness and intoxicating light, with unknown spaces and apparently unusual objects.   
However, it is important to underline that the strange and the unusual are not exactly inherent qualities in things and places, although some images are able to depict more perplexing and unwonted situations.   The impression of strangeness is triggered by us as spectators and emerges from our sensitivity and perceptibility. It arises from a mental predisposition which, aroused by the image's freezing of space and time, magically blurs the borders between real and unreal, known and unknown, reinforcing a disturbing ambiguity, as if they were emanations of a hypnagogic state, the altered consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, in which the individual is more receptive to the emergence of other frequencies of vision. It is as though the photographer, during his peripatetic forays into the city, were recombining viewpoints – those of the anthropologist and the artist, the wanderer and the sleepwalker, the historian and the critic, a gaze created by crossovers and oscillations between states of perception and conscience that cannot avoid superimposing reality and fiction.
Nothing appears to happen in these places. Where are the inhabitants and the bystanders? There are no discernible movements or gestures.  There is no narrative.  A petrified world, deathly silent, where all that remains are spaces, constructions, and objects that point to a prior history.  An emptiness that disconcerts us and induces us to look even when there is apparently nothing to see. They are photographs built on silence and inexpressiveness, encouraging an inner shift towards an openness to the myriad of interpretive and psychological games at play.  In the first instance, because, as pointed out by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, "places (...) are like the presences of diverse absences. What appears designates what is no longer there and what can no longer be seen.  (...) There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can 'invoke' or not". And because both the fixity of the photograph and the apparent emptiness suggested by the image are always transformed by the spectator, who attempts to give them life, which is always the case when the eye and the mind are confronted by fixity and emptiness.   
What are the experiential and perceptive horizons of a photographed place? How does photography, with its limitations and capabilities, have the prerogative to reconfigure the appearance of the territory and, consequently, provoke a perceptibility that is not confined to an experience of the visible? What are the underlying relationships between the city, its representations, and the social actuality? These are overarching questions for André Cepeda and many other contemporary artists, for whom tackling urban realities entails the ever more relevant and vital challenge of addressing the phenomena of appropriation and transformation of space, and recovering the incidents, quandaries, and echoes of mankind's history and its representations.  
These are not new preoccupations within the field of photography. What is evident is the unique role that this medium has assumed and continues to assume when experimenting with the limits of the visible, summoning and merging various temporalities as a means of (re)examining history.     Of the countless examples in the history of photography, we will only  cite the renowned photographs by Jacques-André Boiffard for André Breton's novel Nadja (just to allow us to trace a lineage that will be embraced by André Cepeda). A series of photographs of a deserted Paris, which functions as a non-official map of the city, each place photographed for having been the setting of a radical or revolutionary event in history. To bring up these spaces entailed the creation of another city, a city stripped of the charm of bourgeois life, a counter-archive of capitalist urbanity.  
Thus, André Cepeda's wanderings (strolls, tours) can be considered a process, an exercise in confrontation  and integration of body and space, eye and mind.  They are also about considering the possibility of forming new insights, a viewpoint with heuristic motivations, i.e. that seeks a different understanding of the nature of things, of knowledge (or rather non-knowledge) that favours the perceptible and the subjective. This is an experiential and conceptual attitude, which inevitably likens Depois to the legacy of an artist like Robert Smithson, in particular his seminal work A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967). Initially published in the magazine Artforum, the work comprises a series of photographs of various “monuments” on the banks of the Passaic River, and a text that constructs a narrative describing the location and the return to his birthplace a few months before his 30th birthday.  The work evokes (through the images and text) “monuments” of an alien land, in this case the land of his birth, as if it were a different planet, a place subjected to a series of semantic experiences, testing the physical and conceptual parameters, pitting one against the other. In short, examining the place and seeking an active understanding instead of succumbing to the complacency of familiarity.  
This series of works contains a variety of subjects and photographic types.  One could begin with two images that appear as though they are intended to mutually gaze at each other, two types of representation, two opposing worlds: on the one hand, an oblique view of the trunks of a cactus under a faint light and an enigmatic blue; on the other, the detail of an architectural structure on a building.   Nature vs. culture, entropy vs. formal and material order, gradual growth vs. abrupt growth, night vs. day, conscious vs. subconscious; the conflict suggested by the confrontation of these two images delineates, to some degree, the horizon and the scope of the relationships intertwined within this place of images (in the sense that Cepeda's images construct a new place, relatively discordant with the sites that he photographed).  
They are images that aspire to be processes, relationships between the visible and the speakable, means of playing with the before and after, with territorial identity and alterity.  This way of creating and envisioning photography aligns Cepeda's work with a notable trend in contemporary photography that leans towards speculative and fictional exercises, visual and poetic expression, and the value of indetermination in the works, as legitimate (and necessary) forms and means of representing and addressing our experience of reality.
Some images are more ambiguous (especially in the way they assume the disruptive effect of light), while others present a more direct and literal stance, without ever sacrificing their transitory potencial. The confrontations between interior and exterior, between public space and private space, the idea of housing or shelter, also integrate the overarching themes that permeate this visual territory, as symptoms of a city marked by a radical transformation of its functional dynamics and forms of occupation.   
Particularly significant for Depois, since it constitutes its point of departure, is the series of eight photographs of a large sculpture by José Rodrigues. The sculpture is entitled Monumento ao empresário (Monument to the entrepreneur) and was unveiled in 1992 by then Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva. It is a work with post-modern architectural traits but which stands out most for its significant ideological overtones, a tribute to an economic growth model that would supposedly drive Portugal's development to the levels of the Central European countries. These photographs by André Cepeda never reveal the entire monument, nor its location on the intersection between Avenida da Boavista and Avenida Marechal Gomes da Costa. What we see are points of view, at times fragmented, at others close to sections of the sculpture. To the detriment of a comprehensive view, the photographs allow us to appreciate the characteristics of the materials, the mirrored glass, the iron, the wood, the stone, and the concrete.  Cepeda took these photographs over several months in 2014 and 2015, a period when the public arena in Portugal was plagued by the financial scandals and the effects of the deep economic and social crisis that continues to afflict various sectors of Portuguese society.  Accentuated by the focus on traces of vandalism and the deterioration of the materials, these eight images produce a fragmentation of the sculpture, configuring it as an anti-monument, a critical reversal of the homage to the entrepreneur (also as the personification of an economic, political, and social programme), highlighting the artist's interest in combining aesthetics and historical scrutiny.     
This example, like so many others that are apparent in Depois, demonstrates a clear attempt by André Cepeda to bring the equivocal effects of photography to bear: on the one hand, we see that the photographic images establish and document materials, objects, and situations, sanctioning them with the weight of reality; yet, along totally different lines, there is this sense of the erosion of confidence in the power of representation to correlate with the real world. One sees that the images are not limited to freezing and recreating the existing world, that there is an illusory dimension (magical, hallucinatory, and surreal) which allows the image to potentially create a new, parallel reality.
All the Depois photographs undoubtedly evoke a bleak landscape, condemned to desertification, abandonment, and oblivion (recurring themes in Cepeda's work, particularly in Ontem ("Yesterday") and Rien ("Nothing"). However, this should not distract us from the essence of these photographs.  They are about what remains of humankind, within the sphere of the city, in public space, in architecture, on the ground, in objects, even when there is nobody left to tell us how things were.   They are images of rubble and remains – of the lives of its inhabitants, of the accomplishments of its constructors –, places where the human presence seems to have been replaced by its ghosts.    
It is a gloomy scenario, a city confronted with the vision of its dystopic destiny.    One could conjure images of André Cepeda when recalling the words of the stalker in the homonymous film by Andrei Tarkovsky, the man who drove people to an apocalyptic and mutating place called the Zone: “Our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring about change here. And we are in no condition to comprehend them. Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can either be plain and easy or impossibly confusing. That’s how the zone is. It may even seem capricious. But in fact, at any moment it is exactly as we devise it, in our consciousness… everything that happens here depends on us, not on the zone.”
Depois is, in essence, a work about what remains, but also about our desires and what we are prepared to see in and make of the images, to reclaim the need for an ethics of observation and reflection on all the sites of abandonment and oblivion.

Sérgio Mah