Biographie
Fernando Marante (Matosinhos, Portugal, 1973) is a visual artist based in Lisbon. He studied at the Ar.Co Visual Communication Centre in Lisbon, where he received two scholarships sponsored by Leonor and António Parreira (2015/2016) and by the Victor e Graça Carmona e Costa Foundation (2018/2019). He is one of the four winners of the Carte Blanche Etudiants 2019 section of Paris Photo and was a finalist in the Descubrimientos de PHotoEspaña 2019 section. In Portugal he has shown his work in various exhibitions including the Vila Franca de Xira Biennial of Photography (VF18) and the Cerveira International Art Biennial (2018). He was a finalist for the Carpe Diem Millennium BCP Award in 2018. Since April 2019, he is represented by the Módulo Gallery in Lisbon.
Présentation
Starting from the hypothesis that there is no such thing as abstract photography, since it is always connected to real elements in the concrete world, this series of images plays with this pseudo-constraint by preserving an identifiable object while at the same time escaping from it. We know that these images represent something, but this representation is ambivalent in its relation to its context, thus perturbing the codes of representation themselves.
These images as hypothesis, with the addition of movement and duration, are synthesised by the mechanical eye of the camera and exist solely as a theoretical possibility* within the realm of objects. Is arrested movement still movement?
This project is concerned with the exploration of mechanisms for representation within photography, by playing with ideas of visibility which only the “grammar” of photography can provide for us.
As a visual essay, it takes its title from that of the famous lessons, “Die Frage nach dem Ding” of Martin Heidegger, where the question, “What is a thing” is more important than the reply.
* whose object is knowledge, which seeks knowledge.