Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Editor of worlds

By Eder Chiodetto From the unlikely crossing between knowledge acquired in a technical course on industrial chemistry and in classical guitar lessons, Eustáquio Neves lapidated his original talent for maneuvering images and metaphors, transfiguring meanings,juxtaposing realities, inventions, and memory.

Since1987, when he started doing research at his first laboratory in Belo Horizonte, a certain nonconformity and an attitude oftransgression permeated the representation with which he sought to express his personaland subjective realm.

Caos urbano (1992),his first series, already showed signs of the best tradition of artists who, throughouthistory, started to approach the photograph as it comes out of the camera as raw material that would require intervention toadjust to the intended representation. A way of transfiguring the photographic moment, expanding its symbolic potentialities.

The mode of thinking up the process of capturing, intervening with, and editing images, be it in photographic series or in his more recent production, which gave rise to an enticing selection of video works, reveals an editor of worlds. His eyes, heart, and mind are on an obsessive quest—even though his works are produced in the peace and quiet of those who have chosen to live outside the large centers—to find significance in the endless flow of information to which we are submitted in contemporary times.

The labyrinthic path through which he tackles issues so dear to Brazilian sociology, such as soccer and the descendents of slaves in the Futebol (1998–99) and Arturos (1993–97) series, respectively, shows a complex artist who is highly skilled when it comes to translating his critical and historical consciousness into atmospheres, textures, and fuzzy colors.

What is at play here, however, is not the tradition of denunciation of documentary photography. The images do not necessarily impel us to react to the facts depicted. By stretching the photographic filmto the limit of engraving and painting, Neves juxtaposes and arrives at the original state of things, permeating it with a nostalgic, quasi-melancholy reflection. The multilayered enigmas contained in his work do not dialogue with the voracious reason of those who consume the daily media images, but rather with a more accurate perception that is summoned as soon as we are faced with the thick,playful atmospheres that he invents.

Technically speaking, part of the magic contained in his work arises out of the artist’s ability to impregnate complex images with various symbols that juxtapose each other, creating layers of different depths. Such optical strategy forces the eyes of those looking to not simply “scan” the images laterally, but rather to carry out a prospecting of their insides. It is an effective way of betraying the lethargy of contemporary men’s eyes, chastised by the excess of images and, at the same time, exciting the iris and theperception to the possibilities of novel approaches.

In the beginning, however, there was music. And its presence in the artist’s lifecalled for rhythms, compositions, sound phrases, new combinations. Orchestrating the endless supply of sounds, images, and information that emerged abruptly with the Internetwas a natural need for someone who remained connected both with the historical references of his time and the innovations that would come up to radically alter the symbolic trades between people.

Thus came Abismo virtual, which earned Eustáquio Neves the Videobrasil WBK Vrije Academie Prize at the Videobrasil 2007. Starting from his authorial images, the artist started to establish connections with images sent by other people, captured on YouTube and mixed with elements extraneous to the new technologies, such as analog photographs, laboratory experiments, etc. His universe of collage took a step towards differentiation by incorporating other authorships, leading him, once and for all, to take on the persona of an editor, who, like a disc jockey, writes sentences using words from different people and sources.

Such is a strongly contemporary artisticattitude, which, countering the monotonyand the numbing trend of the generation of information without reflection that was madepossible through massive access to new technologies, goes against the grain by questioning and ascribing another logic to the empty,almost spontaneously generated images. Theartist subversively resignifies those images, granting them meanings that escape their own selves and the initial intentions of their authors/automatons.

The images, most of all those made by amateurs, arise out of theneed to certify the existence of one’s space-time, to rectify one’s memories, to leave a track. But the fact remains that a large portion of that production dies out without an audience, without ever getting to have areal meaning in society or even in the medium in which they were generated. Abandoned inside virtual memories that agonize while awaiting editing, those images are invariablyforgotten in computer folders that are destined to be infected by viruses, converted into corrupted bytes, erased.

Such iconography, on the opposite direction of the notion of being converted into perennial instancesof memory, the motive that led to its creation, is quickly turned into a certificate ofcollective amnesia. To photograph, to record,to forget. This is the paradoxical circuit that conflagrates the majority of contemporary image production.

Even though amnesia is a gift in the face of so much information, artists such as Neves know how to seek historical references in the past and examine them in the light of the new times. By putting the collective memory into perspective, the artist does a clever work in the recentvideo Post No Bill, made from footagerecorded in Lagos, Nigeria.

“Wealthy people in Nigeria in present days are descendents of former slaves in Brazil. Their predecessors, upon returning from the slave regime, dominated local trade. The fact of havingperceived themselves as goods during the slavery period provided them with the key to understand the game of trade,” says the artist.

Based on this frightful conclusion, he builds a sonata of sorts with collages of noise from the hellish traffic of Lagos, coupled with the irony of posters glued with the expression “Post no bill.” Images captured and/or transformed, in low resolution, fragmentthe screen with a plot of pixels that reverberates on the shape of the very posters which, stuck on a panel, contribute to therestoration of silence.

In this mosaic that agglutinates information from the past thatearns new connotations in the present, like the story of the slaves who somehow benefited in the future from the fact of having been reduced to goods, Neves makes a very pertinent crossing that brings together elements of dead languages, as he calls them; corrupting the cleanliness and perfection of new media with technologies that have already been surpassed.

Again, these are stories that call for deciphering not only in their illusory surface beauty, but also in the involving plots, in the dissonant fissures created by the pixels that burst on the screen, revealing the flesh that constitutes the image and expands beyond its historic, anthropological, aesthetical meanings.

Photography, film, painting, engraving, music, rhythm, reflection, collective history, and individual memory. Mix it all up in a chemical laboratoryand turn it into a score for classicalguitar. A recipe that cannot be copied, by Eustáquio Neves.