TIME DISRUPTED
Gustavo Araujo, like every true photographer, is fascinated and anguished by the fleeting moment, which he seeks to suspend in time with a sense of mystery that will suffuse the image with a life of its own. In Araujo’s case, memory –the essential nourishment of photography— is transmuted into nostalgia. His recent work delves into the very nature of nostalgia, a feeling born of the terrible certainty that all time past, whether distant or recent, is irretrievably lost. This has moved him to explore different formal and emotional routes. Melancholy memories of his childhood, in particular on family beach trips, lead him to compile a scrapbook in which he groups together various photographs simulating a family album, complete with handwritten marginal notes. Later, from children and youths playing on the beach or swimming in the sea, he shifted to portraits of objects or people in interiors or exteriors. In his images, objects are closely scrutinized, but people are frequently blurred or only partially visible, transmitting with disturbing eloquence the fragility of human relationships and the insurmountable obstacle of knowing one another.
In his work there is an almost total rejection of stasis. Figures are always in motion and objects appear photographed from different angles and juxtaposed in great, disrupted sequences (which often portray the unpredictable movements of objects in the wind, or people in sleep, wind and sleep both being “magical” forces that break in on prosaic reality.) Thus, the passing of time is central to Araujo’s work, which is not common in photography but rather in cinema. But films cannot give us what Araujo can: a narrative at once unconnected and simultaneous. His visual puzzles force the spectator to play a more active role than in conventional static photography. The viewer’s gaze hops from one image to another, trying to reconstruct a personal interpretation of the “story”, on the basis of his or her own...