The photographs of Edgar Martins (Évora, 1977) go beyond the mere image and referent on which they are based. By becoming reflexive and self-critical, they escape the scope of the purely photographic without relinquishing its essence. We can consider them to exist in a hybrid terrain, with affinities not only to painting (apparent in the idea of tableaux and the importance that he grants to composition) but also, to cinema (plateaux) and even to sculpture, through the way in which they establish themselves as images-objects. This last characteristic causes them to resemble characters in a quasi-absurd or nonsensical narrative and recalls the ready-mades of the Dadaists and Surrealists. The elements of the bizarre that we discover in these images (in which humans and animals rarely appear) are proof of this theory, helping to establish a sense of distance in the observer, who distrusts what he sees but surrenders to it through a sort of suspension of disbelief (Coleridge) that raises questions in his mind: “Is this a real place or one fabricated by the artist? Could we be immersed in an F for Fake kind of world?”

In their contemporary relevance, these images correspond to what G. Lipovetsky predicted would be the era of screen culture, in which images can be defined according to three broad categories ranging from image-excess to image-multiplex and image-distance, playing on the logic of special effects; in a style that is almost baroque, simulacral, hyper-real, in which the screen pervades everything. Edgar Martins’ images are therefore a crime scene in which reality is the victim and everyone is trying to establish when, how and by whom the murder was committed (as in a game of Cluedo). Besides playing the role of a forensics specialist, the artist is also a visual archaeologist who brings the finds and ruins of the contemporary to the light of day. 

The theatricality and artificiality of these images, which oscillate between the real and the imaginary, bring them closer to the notion of the fantastic via a certain familiar strangeness that imbues the episode in front of us with suspense. Rather than being random images, chosen according to chance, they stem from a process of conceptual idealization undertaken by the artist, who, like a scientist, makes a prior and careful study of the arrangement of the elements, which are placed in a highly elaborate compositive order.

In a tradition associated with topographic photography, the locations depicted by Edgar Martins are places that are not yet places, populated by floating signifiers. That is, they are places which are open to a multiplicity of meanings, to an infinite possibility that is not contained by the physical boundaries of the image. The mind thereby uncovers the structure of the world, which at times is revealed in excesses of meaning so that we may better understand it. The work of art is thus transformed into a language through which we are able to access reality, reinventing it as if it were a remake. The fixity is therefore only apparent, the result of the fact that one of photography’s functions is to crystallize time and the world. Otherwise, through the doubts that they awaken and the associations that they suggest, the images impart a dynamic of thought that sets them in motion, forcing us to reflect on the world around us.

Carla de Utra Mendes