À Tona , Pivô-SP, 2013
Feco Hamburger’s exhibition À Tona gathers three works – Endoscopia Tokyo Bonito, the Cavernas series, and Pulmão – developed between 2009 and 2013, that complete a cycle of research and interest of the São Paulo artist in the discovery and formation of the image. The exhibition is held in a light-controlled environment, displaying photographs, videos and projections unveiled by the public in motion, revealing intriguing images as well as the photographic mechanism employed.
The installation Endoscopia Tokyo Bonito involves the projection of a video toward the floor, where a black, circular plate holding water reflects the projection on to the wall. The recording binds a chain of almost abstract images of a reflecting pool and garden eels. The artist presents them as reflections on situations of porosity and crossing that provoke thoughts about their origin and the processes that generate them.
The photographs from the Cavernas series (Brazil Photography Prize 2012) were taken in the dark, in a cave region in the south of São Paulo state, and printed in a single colour on a reflective support. Hamburger’s solution ensures the prints are only visible from a perspective aligned between the spectator and the light. The works are therefore completed with the spectator’s physical participation, who structures this relation by moving.
The video Pulmão presents the inside of a cave that seems to get lighter and darker in a cyclical rhythm. The image is created through the digital animated video of a single photograph edited in different light contrasts. The linear and gradual variation of the contrast curve composes a loop of 24-frame-per-second animated images, creating a kind of cadence. The video is watched with noise-cancelling headphones, immersing the spectator in the perception of his own breathing and establishing a dialogue between the image and his body.
Hamburger’s interest in the relationship between the technical processes that form images and the concepts of latency and presence has been evident since 2004, with the project Noites em Claro of long exposure photographs that allow the accumulation of the light, and has continued in recent works such as the video installation Neutrino (2010), the prints Ingredientes and Tricot (2011), and the machine Episódios (2011).
His studies continue in the works exhibited in À Tona, Pivô, SP, 2013, in which the manipulation of the work and interactivity combine in a process that dispenses with time to reflect on the essence of the image formation, culminating in experience as the definitive link of the work.
Exhibition À Tona , Pivô, SP, 2013