KUNST TILE

One attraction of Portugal's cities, particularly Lisbon and Porto, has always been their tiled walls. What could be more fitting than to give them their very own tile series, the Azulejos: Tile(s) depicting tile(s), individually or as a series, enlarged, reduced, a detail cut out or cut off, as an ironic comment, or worn by exposure to the weather.

Portugal's metropolis is being transformed by environmental impacts and the Atlantic sun. The process of decay yields effects of abstract beauty. The morbidity of the walls exudes a melancholy charm, and the city is imbued with the atmosphere celebrated in its fado singing.

Artificial flowers lose their colour, collect dust, form a patina. Iron bars turn rusty, curtains and vases fade. Exposed to the wind and weather, colours that were once rich turn to delicate shades, shapes and contours, signs of transience and final rest.

The lightness of being. Bodies carried by the water in a swimming pool. Unusual perspectives continually produce new constellations. Snapshots, which combine representational and abstract elements, colour fields with spatial depth.

The image details are selected from urban situations, such as tarpaulins on building sites and the plastic sheeting used during renovation work to shield buildings from traffic and passers-by. The theme may be a profane one, but the painterly power and message of the almost monochrome surfaces, structured only by the light, are all the more lyrical.

Found in alcoves and on walls, graffiti are the quickest and newest form of graphic expression in our cities, unsurpassed in their dynamic. They comment on the questions and topics of our time, and are so ephemeral that capturing them on this new medium lends them a timelessly beautiful validity.

Light strikes objects which absorb it, forming obstacles that cast shadows. Shadows, which lend visible shape to a fleeting and immaterial phenomenon, are pointers to the moment and the passing of time.

Shadowy realms, graphic in their appearance, under the elevated railways of Chicago and New York City. Hard shadows cast by steel bridge constructions trace a regular pattern on the roadways and sidewalks, broken up by a variety of road markings running at right angles or diagonally.

The openness of a landscape in black and white. The classic way to see what is essential: the eye is drawn to structures and contrasts, the smooth transitions in the grey tones convey calm.

Urban fringes, industrial architecture and cityscapes captured in a dynamic which is seen to correspond to their time and their function. Our modern world and its beginnings, discovered in black and white.

French café chairs, stacked in rows, partly covered with sheets. A scenario that lends these four-legged objects quite curious associations and new visual content, thanks to the mysterious light and the semi-transparency of their plastic throws.

The moving surface, sometimes foaming, laced with bubbles and pearls, sometimes adorned with rings, ripples and reflections, plays with its two-tone pattern and generates rhythms suffused with musicality and poetry.

A bare room, unpretentious and shored up with massive steel girders of a past industrial architecture. The very surroundings are transfigured by the dusty charm of old brick-built factories. Interior and exterior are connected, overlaid, given a reflective sheen and shrouded by the washed-out colours and the dim light. Light and dark, day and night.