[Trending News] Walls/Cabrita: Photography as sensitive inscription

I do not know wide details about the friendship relationship between Augusto Cabrita and Carlos Paredes and this allows me to imagine, to discuss, to overcome the metric rigor of biographical rebels. But I know they were deeply admired and shared a moving love for Portuguese culture and their people, the amplex of simple people. At the same time, they inhabited an aesthetic constellation, an inner territory, free, of artistic profusion and glow, indifferent to the aesthetic conditioning exercised by a totalitarian and obsolete regime. One soaked by the flexibility of the guitar, its poetic reverberation and magnitude; The other, for photography and cinema and its possibilities of eternalizing the world and life, but also to go beyond the real.

Some of the most recognizable photographs of Carlos Paredes are from Augusto, at a time when images – far from hoping in series – they retired an aura, allowing it to reveal in depth the material and symbolic conditions of existence, the texture of space and time . This historical particularity is even more evident when observed diachronically, from a current rapid time, pregnant in transitory images and where the human being himself, artist or not, tends to predispose to this devitalizing acceleration from a continuous appearance.

When I observe images of Carlos Paredes, a man of deep talent and candor, I go to another sensitive field, stripped of spotlight and devices. I am displaced from the imagery that punctuates contemporary age and enter another inscription, another phenomenology. Carlos was a man who wanted to play guitar. That was his verb, his design. It did not intend to become an icon of anything. Carlos was a silent character. Discreet and authentic.

I can therefore imagine the reserve with which I submitted to the photographic look.

Among several photographs that have become record covers, captured by Augusto, there is a series that was in thought. One day, from the distant 1960s-almost in their term-the two friends will have been found in Lisbon in order to have a cover image for an album through this meeting. But not only. Between Eduardo VII Park, Cais das Columas and Belém, cinematographic images were also produced. The result was a documentary for television, In the chainof course, rhythmic by the Master's music, where, however, at the request of Augustus, Paredes had made available to play improvisation. The documentary, unfortunately, seems to have been lost among the unfathomable RTP files.

Almost 60 years separate me from this moment that I didn't live, but it seems so clear. There is a commotion that is going through me whenever I think of Carlos Paredes, in its mastery, in its amplex guitaristic, in its tender way of being and presenting itself before others. Almost 60 years later, I imagine Augusto's request under the beautiful Light of Lisbon: “Carlos, please actually naturally, as if the House was not here.” Carlos Anui. It strategically projects the look at the Lonjura, at an indeterminating point, walking between passersby, between chestnuts and balloons. Carlos ignores that he is an icon. It brings a guitar and the pulse of a captive people.

Less instrument than body.

We owe it so much, Master.