Over the past three decades, Brazilian photographer Valdir Cruz has chronicled unique and ephemeral places in Brazil where the people and the landscapes create an indelible impression on the viewer. His new exhibition Presences is a selection of photographs from three projects: Faces of the Rainforest, The Water’s Way (O caminho das águas), and Roots (Raízes). Thus, three presences dominate the show currently on view at Throckmorton Fine Art in New York.
In Faces of the Rainforest, the photographs of indigenous people are drawn from six years of expeditions to remote areas of the Brazilian and Venezuelan Amazon rainforests. Cruz did not merely visit these tribes. He spent upwards of five months living with them and participating in their daily lives. The candor of these images reflects the familiar terms of their relationship. Among the human subjects chosen by Cruz is the Chief of the Wai-Wai, an Archer, a Makuxi Woman, a Man with Painted Body and Face, a Korubo Mother and Child, a Boy with a Bow and Arrow, Makuxi Youth, a Yanomami Girl Playing in a Hammock, The Hunt, and an Afternoon Ritual dance.
With the same intensity, Cruz, over many years, photographed the otherworldly waterfalls of his native state, Paraná, for The Water’s Way. American author and critic Lyle Rexer writes: “The magnetic center of Cruz’s work is Brazil’s southern Paraná state, where the vast network of tributaries and waterfalls expunges the boundaries between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay…. Water is a force, throughout this part of the world, and everything is process, not fixity. You can hear the water when you can’t see it – like the ocean. But unlike the ocean, its motion is not repetitive but one of ceaseless transit…. ‘Immersive’ is the word used by the critic Rubens Fernandes Junior to describe their capacity to convey a viewer to that place.”
The Brazilian state of São Paulo commissioned Cruz to research and photograph the extraordinary trees of the region, resulting in a collection of spectacular “portraits” in Roots. Rexer writes on this subject: “He focuses his most attentive gaze on the trunks and roots of the tallest trees. As with the waterfalls, his camera creates a second nature, with extreme viewpoints and an exaggerated sense of towering growth…The motion of the trees is all upward rather than downward, a vast defiant struggle against gravity and time… Yet these photographs of roots and ascending trunks do not arrest time but almost seem to deny it.”
Valdir Cruz, Presences
December 7, 2017 – February 24, 2018
Throckmorton Fine Art
145 E. 57th Street, 3rd Fl.
New York, NY 10022
USA
