LISBON, PORTUGAL.- Módulo Gallery presents Brígida Mendes, on view from December 16 to January 13, 2007. More and more are the portuguese artists who choose photography as the privileged means for the artistic creation and experimentation. In this occasion I would like to emphasize the work of Brígida Mendes (Tomar, 1977), who will exhibit a whole of seven photographs (2005-2006) in the Gallery Módulo in Lisbon in December, some of these photographs were awarded with the Photographers' Gallery Graduate Award 2006. Graduated in Painting at the University of Lisbon and MA Course in Photography at the Royal College of Art, it was in 2002 when her public presentation in the portuguese gallery field happened, with two works which were not photography, but sculpture and installation. This last one represented a huge chess set whose pieces reproduced the head and the features of the artist’s mother. Starting point of the use and appropriation of the mother’s image which would continue in the photographic works carried out afterwards, always in black and white. Brígida Mendes’ work calls for a system of questions and practices which come together in the idea of experience of art: perception, widening, theatricality, the relation reality/fictiontruth/sham, the connection work-public through the look and the limits of photography as an art. In 2003 she presented a series of photographs in which her mother “ disguised with a white dress which referred to the imagination of children’s stories “ reproduced several moments or activities of domestic-rural nature. The following year, the artist took up again her mother as the leading lady. The theme of the photographic narration is the personal representation of some incidents regarding the iconography of the Virgin’s life. The box which surrounds the scenes appears covered with a white fabric with black spots, and even the clothes repeat the same pattern of special visual impact. The masked faces of the figures reproduce the facial model of the protagonist, a constant theme which connects a previous piece, the chess set.

In an interview, Brígida Mendes was unwilling to talk about her work, that way she tried to avoid guiding people through a certain reading of her images. For that reason it could be said that according to the artist the factors of perception and reaction are essential when facing work and public. The spectator may not be successful when reading the images, but this ‘failure’ is per se another interesting subject, either the failure of the person who contemplates the work of art or the failure of the person who creates it. According to Brígida Mendes what is interesting is not the final result, but the creative exercise per se. The strict planning of scenes recuperates the pictorial paradigms of composition and the use of lights and shades, as well as the theatre resource of the scenery and the costume, necessary devices in the creation process of the characters. The actor plays a character, but it is not the character. Maybe, the artist turns her mother into a stage element because she is the motif she knows better and the person who knows her better. This exercise of repeated representation of an identity means an auxiliary means in the expression and materialization of her interpretation of the identity of art and photography.

In 2005 the artist went on with her experiments around the potentiality of the costume and the theatricality in photography, assumed as a method of artistic investigation, as the staging which only makes sense with the inclusion of the contemplating public. It is the experience of looking as an integral part of the experience of art. This perception of the staging makes you think about the concept of appearance, since her photographs are rather narrative, fictitious, difficult inventions of reality. This comparison between fiction and reality reaches illusionist hints in the most recent series. It’s expected not to make you doubt about the photographic image reality, but about the kind of manipulation present in the work, trying to make you be distrustful with the human capacity to distinguish between illusion and reality. Making the device fictitious in order to capture certain staged reality and everything hidden. The perfect examples are her mirror-photographs, where she suggests a game of symmetric images, apparently unfold, paying attention to the artificial nature of representation. There is a wish to manipulating this images, although not through a technique manipulation, but optical. Here it is one of the great pleasures of contemporary art: subverting the concept of illusion, making the spectator interpret the deceptive as truthful. Fernando Montesinos. Art historian and critic.