Caio Reisewitz – PLANTES, PAVILLONS ET PÉTROLE

05.09 – 24.10 / 2015
Bendana-Pinel Gallery, Paris

“Central figure in contemporary Brazilian photography, Caio Reisewitz (born in 1967 in São Paulo, Brazil) is constantly questioning the ambiguous relation between man and his environment.
Its urban or natural landscapes highlight the contradictions of Brazil, caught between a desire to preserve an exceptionally rich environmental heritage and the will for exponential growth. Caio Reisewitz seeks to capture the image of a fragile beauty, that of an unspoiled nature; an Eden endangered by deforestation, oil exploitation, expansion of settlements.
Anxious to witness a movement that seems inexorable, the artist immediately developed an intrest for colonial legacy, for modernist architectural achievements of the twentieth century as tropical forests. But if Caio Reisewitz intends to «document» Brazil as it is today, his work is the opposite of a purely objective photographic inventory … First, because obviously he composes his images with the eye of a painter, attentive to their construction and a certain aesthetic ideal which inevitably includes color. Also, because he intervenes directly on the photographs, especially through a practice of collage through which he inserts an urban landscape in the middle of a lush jungle.
Thus, his photographic work questions the real and/or the unreal, the natural and the artificial, the reflection of reality and the artist’s interpretation. The collages, allow it to produce visions somewhat chimerical, cities from nowhere in the middle of the forest, evoking at the same time the way some large Brazilian cities (Brasilia, to quote the most famous) were built from scratch in the middle of virgin land.
The strength of Caio Reisewitz’s work stems from its paradox: summons images of harmony and chaos without establishing a hierarchy between them, bringing forth a form of poetry at odds with reality.”
Françoise Claire Prodhon

Françoise Claire Prodhon

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