Private landscapes

Exhibition text with the same at Galeria Diferença in Lisbon

Carla Rebelo's exhibition in Galeria Diferença's square space presents two pieces from 2013 for the first time exhibited in Lisbon. Private landscapes, which lends its name to this exhibition of works and Gone to Earth are two installations made up of a series of mirrors covered by a deep black that simultaneously conceal and reveal fragments of landscapes. Like a Mirror by Claude, a device used to frame the eye in the observation of nature until the 19th century. XIX, these pieces contain a captive image on their surface, as if the landscapes that these mirrors framed had been printed on them, just as a camera would do. Inverting the function of reflecting what surrounds them, however, these mirrors seem to hide what is around them, revealing their own reality, visible in the black drawing inscribed on their surface but also in the projection that emanates from them. The horizontality where the landscape fragments are drawn returns to our gaze the verticality of an image that exposes another nature, the reflection, the shadow, the negative of the drawing itself. Like Narcissus, we are invited to dive into the contemplation of a mirrored surface, and what we discover is not so much our image, but the substance that inhabits it, a "body" projected from the inside out, or a memory that becomes visible image, perhaps the memory of who, at one time, used these mirrors to frame his gaze.

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Carla Rebelo

April 2018