FERNANDO J. RIBEIROSelf-Service

What's an image? What's the power of an image? It's based on these issues that Fernando J. Ribeiro has been creating a body of work that highlights the processes of subjection of the individual, which prevent the subjectivity that produces life as a work of art.

In Self-Service the artist took as a reference the visual universe of fashion and tries, through the appropriation of advertisement snapshots, to give us back the ruins of the objects of desire produced in that context.

The procedures used by Fernando J. Ribeiro have as a goal to demonstrate the paradoxes inseparable to the relation with the images that surround us. To our effort of trying to incorporate them corresponds the will to hold off from them: we never achieve complete satisfaction, because in every instant new stimuli distract us from a recent past.

The artist showed a series of works – photographs and sculptures – that were subject to procedures of several kinds. Punching, cutting, crumpling, copying, are repeated actions in the exhibitions. There is somehow an attempt at touching the alienating mechanisms underlying each of the appropriated representations.

We can thus observe how an obsessive act of obliterating an image can be mistaken with the idea of party or, in another example, how the essence of an advert is captured through a process of degradation and enlargement of the page in which it is inscribed. In this case, the referent ends up lost because, by being dazzled with a photo flash, a recognised act of violence, the image ends up gaining another dimension, more corporeal, as if resurrecting from among the models celebrated by the advertising artifice.