The instant is neither past nor future. It is latent matter, an open moment in space and time. José Pedro Cortes’ photographs reside in this very territory, which is no fluke, but their essential condition.

They are not static enunciations, but rather bits of reality that, by refusing their own linearity, become enigmas. Neither can we fully decipher them, nor can we ever definitively pinpoint the time before or after them, beyond their inhabiting gaze. Maybe the only certainty is the framing of the artist-photographer’s perspective that gives body-presence to the images.

I initially try to unravel any possible meanings, to find the layers within the works. But then I realise that the purpose of the exhibition is the exact opposite, since the exercise the artist invites us to do is not one of image purging, but of poetic exploration. If I initially perceive openness to the instant as an essential element, this latency spreads to my body.

I then focus on two elements that subtly emerge in the exhibition grounds: time and water.

Teenagers play in a river, under a bridge. The dive is imminent. But what does it mean to plunge into the Heraclitean flow of these waters? I can just picture the laughter and sounds, the echoes expanding between the bridge’s tall pillars – built matter – and the water.

‘It is not possible to step twice into the same river… It scatters and again comes together, and approaches and recedes.’ (Heraclitus in McKirahan, 118)

‘Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow.’ (ibidem)

‘We step into and we do not step into the same rivers. We are and we are not.” (ibidem)

Heraclitus’ first excerpt reminds us that we cannot immerse ourselves in the same place twice, as the waters are constantly moving. The second and third fragments – ‘entering and not entering’, ‘being and not being’ – may possibly be drawn from material irreversibility, from the limits of existence. Moving beyond the water flow, there is the flux of the human body and the air, of the stone and concrete layers comprising the bridge in an entropic becoming. I look at those teenagers again. If they ever cross the same waters again, it will not only be the body that inhabits them, but also the matter of the world that goes far beyond human life, because the past now exists downstream. But José Pedro Cortes insists on capturing the instant, on holding the fragment in eternal youth, as if the matter behind the memories were made of a different substance to any other material in the world.

A different photograph contains toys on the skin, the unrepeatable pursuit of leisure. To play for the sake of it, where every part of the world is an open field for the imagination. If there is any holy act in this place, surely it is the poem residing in the image. The photographer once again questions time and its substance. The skin of the body is mountain and sea, a substrate for making contact with the primordial meaning of the child’s innocent gesture. The artist’s works repeatedly revisit water, sometimes as a shore on which we walk, as movement between the stones, as an element evading gravity, as lingering humidity, or even as a foundation which, when consecrated, becomes sacralising in itself.

Then there are the remnants, the spoils, the corroded, anthropogenic elements that lead us, once more, to the entropic precipitation of the world.

I see a stone bust and a numb Guernica. I remember Benjamin (2010), the Angel of History attempting to go all the way back and wake up the dead, but the whirlwind blows from Paradise, rolls up in its wings and shoves it inevitably into the future. Guernica is the image of the image, the replica pushed into a corner and brought to light by the artist, emphasising the importance of this work as a manifesto against violence. Guernica is still echoing today. Like the Angel of History, we cannot change the past, but there is still room for action in the present. The response is ambiguous, but it is subtly outlined in the humanising clues.

This is perhaps why José Pedro Cortes’ travel-poem will never be part of documentary photography, as poems do not keep track of facts. They pertain to the ontological notion that interrogates time and its substance, putting us before a reality that is not exhausted, but rather brings forth the visible.

The exhibition is on view at the Brotéria gallery until 12 March.

Bibliography:

BENJAMIN, Walter, O Anjo da História, Editora Assírio Alvim, Lisboa, 2010. ISBN: 978-972-37-1361-9.

MCKIRAHAN, Richard, Philosophy before Socrates: An Introduction with texts and commentary, Hacket Publishing, Indianapolis, 2010 (1994 ed. Original).