PAULO LISBOA – Imagines Plumbi

Imagines Plumbi

Graphite on aluminium

Graphite, plumbago, black lead. 

In these works of P.L. it is the darkness that is substance and its absence that is light, in layer upon layer of meticulous sedimentation.

But what are they? I don´t know. Portals, thresholds, openings to some unknown void, some inner or outer underworld? They seem simultaneously positive and negative in the strict photographic sense, self-instantiating imprints beyond any need for frames or inside jokes. You might see in them an eclipse or a tombstone, or a panoply of rectilinear paradigms. De gustibus non est disputandum. Such language is necessarily metaphorical, even though the images themselves are so literal. I think of the Latin word atramentum, ink and a blackness, and imagine a platonic octopus trying to imagine its own way out of the sea, the austere dreams of a featherless polyped.

Alan Fishbone

Lisboa, September 4, 2018