FOLLOWING CLUES

​

Human language is made of words and images.

​

The images give rise to words, which in turn create images.

It is a game that enthralls us, beckoning us to examine
it. If we allow ourselves to be carried along by it, we end

up creating narratives in the images as well as in their

associations – unfinished narratives, not yet completely

developed. The associations among images suggest stories,

they are wordless commentaries.They are there, before us,

like stories just waiting for someone to tell them.

​

This is what Clovis Ferreira França’s photos do, this
is the game they propose to us.They give us clues
of mistaken understandings – we illude ourselves with

false understandings, and are thus led to a territory of

enchantments, in which subtleties become more apparent

and fragile things are ennobled and celebrated. In the pages

of this book, the images and the game created by
the associations among them situate us between the seen

thing and the interpretation, the thing imagined. What
is represented in the photographer’s work are artifices

that capture our gaze and turn it into a happening.

​

The artist’s images frame a space, they are presented as
a sort of stage, a place for the representation to happen.

With them, we began to ask ourselves about our own

position as beings that look, and as a consequence of

this experience, the gaze itself is posed as a theme.

​

When we reflect on what contemplation is, we can

become aware that we are given to sensations that are not

exactly in the present – we ceaselessly withdraw to a past

or an indefinite future.This wandering of meaning is the

game of art.

​

The things, people and objects shown, when seen through

a poetic, lyrical gaze, remain isolated in a spatiotemporal indetermination.They remain in the realm of fascination,

filtered by our sensibility, celebrating memories.

​

In light of the sensations evoked by the present photographs

I recall the words of a character, a painter in Marcel Proust’s

In Search of Lost Time: “Elstir was unable to look at a flower

without first transplanting it to that inner garden in which

we are obliged always to remain.”

​

Fortunately, speaking is not seeing, and seeing implies
a lack of time for speech.We should let ourselves be carried

away by the qualities that surprise us, we should yield to

the contemplation of these photos, taking pauses to
better enjoy them.

 

SERGIO FINGERMANN
PAINTER