Until mid-February the Ateliê da Imagem in Rio de Janeiro is hosting Livros Possíveis, an exhibition of books of photography. More than twenty artists’ books are on display around the walls of the gallery, alternating with photographs from the books. The books are available to the public who can handle them, unfold them, leaf through them… According to their form. If the excuse of the art book pushed the exhibition’s curators, Rony Maltz and Carolina Cattan, to bring these pieces together in one single exhibition, all of them seem to be different: the formats, the tone used, the techniques and the materials that were adopted (from posters printed using a mimeographic technique to reproductions of family photographs stuck in a small notebook), or even the style to which the books belong. This way the exhibition presents books of a poetic or intimate character sitting side by side with humorous fan magazines and works with a strong graphic emphasis… Connected together (as the introductory text for the exhibition says) by “similarity, by contrast, or by accident”.
In this way the humour of the small album Zoológica, which reproduces articles taking as their subject animals that have appeared in the press or in social media, mixes with Estrangeira, a work of great delicacy as indicated by the fragile cover pages made from tracing paper. A book by Caroline Valansi associating photograms taken from pornographic films to a photographic inventory of the components of a 35mm projector is, itself, presented not far from a work in which the collage technique is also used, but in a quite different tone: in this case Thais Graciotti, has appropriated the pages of a dramatic poem and has truncated part of the text by an overlay of photographs of the sea.
The contrasts, dissonances and echoes thus created by the associations between these books with varied emphases prove attractive and allow the Livros Possíveis exhibition to draw a resolutely heterogeneous panorama of art books, and leave a multiplicity of possibilities in the creation of books to be envisaged.
EXHIBITION
Livros possíveis
Until February 13th, 2016
Ateliê da Imagem
Av. Pasteur, 453 – Urca
22290-255 – Rio de Janeiro
Brazil
Tel: +55 21 22445660 / +55 21 25416930
[email protected]
http://www.ateliedaimagem.com.br/emCartaz.php
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 9pm and Saturday 10am – 5pm
