CURATORIAL TEXTS
Incidental Prism
Scribbling lines, tangling curves, tilting angles in unlikely ways, overlapping rectangles and hexagons, intersecting triangles with semi-straight lines, making the vanishing point infinite. To hope that the drawing will one day become a volume in a landscape. The conversion of an architectural project, starting with scribble ideas and ending with the materialization of a concrete monument, is largely an adventure in which geometry is both a delight and a challenge. Straight lines, curves and all geometric shapes also struggle and reconcile in the wefts woven between the figure and the background of the photographic compositions. Also contributing are the lights and shadows that redraw a volatile and impermanent landscape over the given referent, generating different perceptions of the same space. Invited to photograph the Cidade das Artes, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the inauguration of this monument-building designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc, Bia Serranoni, instead of limiting herself to recording the building in the standard way of architectural photography, opted to carry out a kind of "disassembly" of the building, generating a prism, a vertiginous kaleidoscope of infinite geometric elements that are formed when the lines drawn by the architect play with the incident and abundant light of Rio de Janeiro. By decomposing architecture, "Prisma Incidental" makes it clear, in this montage in which the pieces come together to fabricate other possible dream constructions, that when faced with a work of art or construction, the most important result will always be its ability to generate points of view in the viewer capable of creating an aesthetic experience that excites their imagination. After all, it's always the audience that actually builds landscapes, buildings, images and poems.
Eder Chiodetto
Curator of the Prisma Incidental exhibition
It is in a zone of intersection between architecture, photography and painting that Bia Serranoni delimits her field of poetic investigation. Taking Brazilian Modern Photography as a reference, the artist embarks on an experience of annexing the world from partial perspectives.
Like the painter, who refers to the world both through the stains he makes and the blank spaces he preserves, her photographs give up the referent in order to reach the features and contours of a universe of meanings: what is retained in the soul as quality. Her attention turns to compositional games based on areas of light and shadow that tint the façades of buildings but soon disappear. The artist recognizes and records a range of forms which, although ephemeral, differ from one another clearly enough to arouse in the other, if not a consonance with the lived experience, at least an echo.
There is no way to make an inventory of a sensitive experience - to say what belongs to it or what it lacks. Nor is there any language capable, in a collection of signs, of dealing with what is impalpable. Even so, the artist makes a possible recovery of this world insofar as she remakes it into an image so that someone else can get to know it. All that is needed is for this other person to be sensitive to the threads of silence with which the fabric of this narrative is woven.
It was in the gradual loss of her father's memory and the worlds he now mentally conceives as a refuge (so real to him and invisible to others) that Bia, in the series Deslembrar (part of this set), decided to shed light on his private worlds, as temporary as a ray of light, but also imperceptible to so many. Paying attention to the caesuras that make up this narrative is the possibility of recognizing, in its most intimate texture, a valid emblem of this world and joining the artist at the heart of it. Made transparent or luminous, these cut-outs are capable of revealing not only aspects of the artist's particular world, but also so many others that exist and resist being erased from the memory of each one of us."
Alexandre Sequeira
Curator and visual artist