Farce, Trick, Illusions – Joaquim Paiva

Farce Trick Illusions comprises photographic sequences produced by Joaquim Paiva between 1970 and 1978 in Brasília, Ottawa and Caracas, where the photographer lived and worked. In these works, recombined in the book to shaping a new body of work, the author uses the camera to record his performance in the space, intervenes in the environment and uses the body itself as art material, creating a complex relationship between verbal language – words and letters that he incorporates into images – and photographic discourse.

As the title promises, Farce has an ambiguous relationship with the real. At the same time that the artist documents its presence in the landscape and captures aspects of its own temporality – the “postmodern” 70s –, he leaves gaps for us to distrust this evidence. After all, these are photographs: objects prone to the creation of fictional, staged worlds; images loaded with symbols whose materiality often refers back to the film itself, and to the photographic paper, rather than to any body of flesh and bone, concrete buildings, earth and air, where colored plastics perform a random dance.

Author: Joaquim Paiva, Rio de Janeiro, 1946, photographer, collector of Brazilian and foreign contemporary photography. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro since 2014.