In a forest, I often felt that I was not the one looking at the trees. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, talking to me ... I was there listening.
Paul Klee
André Feliciano’s photos for this exhibition are revealed by a dance of blinking fireflies. In the dark room, the artist releases the luminous insects to fly over and reveal an image on the virgin photographic paper. Trees and plants clicked by Feliciano in New York's Prospect Park, appear little by little on the paper exposed to their green light. If a photo is an instant of light, then for each photo, several instants were needed. It is not enough to blink just once – the insects must meander along the paper to complete the process. Photographs usually freeze the moment, but here the insects carry the passage of time onto the image.
As we gaze at the photos, our eyes identify with the freedom to meander on the paper like the insects’ flight – and to take time for the image to be unveiled. “It's the process of looking at something that makes it beautiful,” suggests David Hockney. In some of the images in the series, the fireflies appear to be inserted in the landscape itself – flying over the photo of the vegetation from the park where they live. If photography is – in its etymology – writing with light, here this essence is emphasized. The bioluminescence of the fireflies emits cold light and almost 100% of its flux is composed of luminous radiation. This light finds the paper and draws the image that we see.
The artist also presents in this exhibition a group of sculptures of trees and photographic fruits. Cast in bronze, they are bathed in silver nitrate – photosensitive material, the base for black and white photos. Instead of papayas, inflated, ripe Rolleiflexes and Nikons spring from the papaya tree, sometimes already fallen from the tree. Cameras have been extensions of our bodies for a long time – and increasingly so through our electronic devices. Photos are our visual diaries, the way we understand the modern world. We think the world photographically and the cameras help us to see it.
Ripe – or obsolete – the cameras fall from the trees. “The fruit is blind. It’s the tree who sees”, as the blind photographer Evgen Bavcar said, quoting the poet René Char, when he came to know Feliciano’s work. Crushed on the ground, those that have fallen potentially become fertilizer for the next technologies, photographs and experiments.
If, on the one hand, photographic cameras and processes become old-fashioned and clicks become trivial, the fireflies remind us of the naturalness of photography. It is alive. And, like everything that lives, it dies – to be reborn differently.
Gisela Gueiros
