This exhibition - which presents Ernesto de Sousa contact sheets from the 1970s - allows us to understand how he learned to use photography as a tool to explore some of his fundamental concerns: the permanent collaborative spirit (it’s no accident that many of the "motifs" represented herein are his fellow artists), the interchangeable relationship between distant periods of times, in particular antiquity and the avant-gardes (e.g. the reference to Olympia, or to Luiz Vaz), the capacity for fragmentation, repetition and unusual relations of scale, in order to redefine our relationship with familiar objects and disciplines. The relationship between these photographs and the cinema is also particularly curious. It’s important to remember that Ernesto de Sousa produced one of the most important films of Portuguese new cinema in the 1960s - Dom Roberto (1962, Young Critics' Prize at Cannes). These contact sheets also make us think about Andy Warhol's famous Screen Tests (1964-1966) and might be viewed as location scouting for never-to-be-made films.
Ricardo Nicolau
