This was an unassuming visit on a typical sunny winter Saturday in Lisbon. I headed to Galeria Cristina Guerra expecting to find the more or less familiar atmosphere to which André Cepeda’s photographs lead us – always fairly recognisable in its stark contrasts, sharp framing and alluring voids. Double Jeu, the exhibition’s title, also appeared to announce, at first glance, a sort of dialectic that we are used to address when thinking about photographic works: presence and absence, light and shadow, figuration and abstraction, content and form, reality and representation. But I should have expected that André Cepeda’s show would take place in a much denser and more complex scenario, the premises and echoes of which I’m still attempting to sort out as I write (I would like to apologise and ask permission from the get-go for those people who can no longer tolerate first-person reviews).

First of all, there is a special sort of opacity in Cepeda’s images – a quality that I consider to be tied to both his sensitive position towards the subject matter and his technical and aesthetic image-making choices. It’s no news that the artist prefers large format cameras and using tripods, meticulously crafting and capturing the shots he fixates on film, often for the first and last time. In this way, around a fleeting and unrepeated instant, there is a slow, silent and careful process; Cepeda looks as if he touches and is touched back. “The forest, the marshes, the fertile plains touched my eyes more than the glances. I rested on the beauty of the world and clasped the odour of the seasons in my hands,” La Comtesse de Noailles’ passionate words tell us[1].

The obscurity in the author’s photographs reflects a unique way of getting in touch with the world, opening up to the invisible rather than closing off the visible. Faced with his photographs, although we are aware of how accurately they are sculpted, we cannot be sure of a full directness: this means that Cepeda’s works are possibly a textbook case of an image that is paradoxically “devoid of the synoptic and totalising objectifying qualities of vision”, coming from a “relationship or intentionality of an entirely different kind”[2]. In fact, photography relinquishes its permanent home in the past to live in the time of surprise. With a certain autonomy, it holds and vibrates unearthed secrets.

This brings to mind the story of Goliádkin, the main character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double: at a certain point in his life, he comes across his identical, homonymous duplicate and gradually succumbs to madness as he watches it usurp his identity. The double takes over the life of the “original” – or simply the one we have known the longest in the narrative – but not to replicate it, but to reshape it. Certainly, duplicity is a diegetic part of Cepeda’s photographs in Double Jeu, assuming itself as the motto of the images, especially in the first room, where we see two large rocks side by side, two cushions on a bed or two empty chairs, oddly close at a secluded café table. However, the hanging model of the exhibition – constructed by the Carrilho da Graça office – implies a mechanism similar to that of the narrator in Dostoevsky’s novel, and tells us about a two-way interaction on many levels, also between the creature – itself replicated, but gifted with independence in its impregnability – and the creator – who sometimes distances himself from and other times approaches his hero’s voice (or, in this case, his exhibition), either contextualising it or parodying it, with a tone which is both comic and tragic.

Double Jeu, by André Cepeda, curated by Joerg Bader and with text Inadequacies by Christiane Vollaire, on view at Galeria Cristina Guerra, until 9 March 2024.

[1] As quoted by Levinas, Emmanuel. (1974/2011), De outro modo que ser ou para lá da essência. (José Luis Pérez; Lavínia Leal Pereira, Trans.). Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, p. 93.
[2] Levinas, Emmanuel. (1961/1980). Totalidade e Infinito. (José Pinto Ribeiro, Trans.). Edições 70, p. 11.