Inside Out, Photography after Form: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection

Inside Out... explored the relationship between photography and form, and more specifically, the way in which a photograph becomes an image through its own work with the form of its referents. This problem is addressed considering three categories: Form, Space and Formlessness, which given the particularities of the issue, have frequent points of contact. For the sake of simplifying, we might say that the artistic modus operandi behind those categories may be defined as: in the first case, the representation of form per se or attention to the play of forms; in the second case, the treatment of the display of form in space, or from another perspective, of space as the place that affords different possibilities for the behavior of form, and if we refer to the third, the investigation of the dissolution of form as a moment in the process of existence of form, that is, the moment in which form is implied. Probably, one of the greatest achievements of the exhibit may have been precisely the way in which the works had been arranged in space to construct the discourse via two fundamental components of the standard thesis exhibition, understood as pertaining to the realm of language: representation and spatialization. Since the show elaborated on issues concerning the theory of photography, it allowed very free associations of the works, unconnected to chronological order or contextual investigation. This was so independently of the fact that the images produced by the photographers from the modern Brazilian school (1940s-1960s) were precisely the ones that were continually used to resolve the articulations, continuities, inflections and ruptures of a discourse whose scope included contemporary post-conceptual practices. And in any case, the historical and contextual elements of the problem that was the subject of study were developed in the excellent catalogue that accompanied the exhibit.