LUÍS ESPINHEIRAShallow Look

With "Olhar Raso" [Shallow Look] by Luis Espinheira (Foz do Sousa, 1979), Sismógrafo continued its program of exhibitions. The show included the installation Levantamento Geral [General Survey], consisting of 23 images from the artist's archive, a significant number of photographs from the series that gives title to the exhibition, and the diptych So far, so good. The exhibition "Olhar Raso" disclosed again that which has been the main line of Espinheira's work: the mapping of moments, geographies and constellations through photographic images. At Sismógrafo this research was evident not only in the installation Levantamento Geral, where we realize how much the record of nature and its phenomena are part of the artists' everyday life, but also in the Olhar Raso series, which reveals the desertification of a world and how beautiful and terrible this season of droughts and floods is. It was that shallow look, close to the matter, be it a land that cleaves or the stars that point out our destiny, which could be experienced in Sismógrafo. An installation, that has as its starting point this atlas of small images (10 x 8 cm), notes of something to come, still in process, but already defining this attention to the impermanence of lives and landscapes – pictures are displayed on sections of a beam, thus reinforcing the idea of a nature in permanent metamorphosis –, and there is also this attempt of exhaustion of a forgotten place, from which ore has already been extracted and in which the force of labour also proliferated.