I visited photographer Cristiano Mascaro’s exhibition at Sesc Pinheiros, “O que os olhos alcançam,” and it is simply unmissable. Photograph after photograph fills the eyes, soul, and mind, the work of one of our most rigorous artists.
With an extraordinarily elegant installation that does justice to the curatorial mastery of Rubens Fernandes Jr. and Ana Helena Curti’s impeccable production, the exhibition covers Cristiano Mascaro’s fifty years of work without being a retrospective.
It moves through the different themes of Mascaro’s work and his use of different cameras. One section is devoted entirely to portraits, another to houses and interiors, and another to photographs taken with a mobile phone. A further section is dedicated specifically to photographs of works by Richard Serra, one of contemporary art’s leading figures, who chose Mascaro as his favorite photographer.
The images are surprising, not only for their technical and aesthetic rigor, but also because Cristiano Mascaro allows us to discover “the extraordinary in the everyday,” as the curator puts it, and the geometry of landscapes.
In the curatorial text, Rubens Fernandes Jr. notes that it was as a student at FAU-USP that Mascaro became fascinated by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and the pages of Life magazine in the FAU-USP library, where he would flee from the more technical classes.
It was at FAU that Mascaro earned his degree and created numerous opportunities to travel and photograph, to document buildings by great architects and anonymous structures, to portray ordinary citizens and give them visibility, to single out details and create panoramic views.
Besides graduating from USP, Mascaro coordinated FAU’s Audiovisual Resources Laboratory from 1974 to 1988. Now the school’s Technical Audiovisual Section, the laboratory plays an important teaching role and maintains an online collection of productions by FAU students, professors, and specialist staff. Among its gems, for example, one can find architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha presenting the MuBE project in 1988.
Recalling the photographer’s relationship with his education at USP is particularly important in our current climate of systematic attacks on public universities. It is impossible to see this exhibition without thinking that we, the public universities, are much more than a collection of excellent schools. We are places where worlds are built…
Do not miss this more-than-beautiful exhibition. It is a lesson in technique, rigor, research, and our continuing need for photography. It is on view at Sesc Pinheiros through the 23rd. Hurry!
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