artnexus #28

The photographer Miguel Rio Branco (1946) was born in the Canary Islands and subsequently went to live in Brazil. His impressive images do not try to document reality, but to interpret it, looking at familiar worlds in such a way that they acquire a strong symbolic force. Thus the figures and situations appearing in his photographs allude metaphorically to the passage of time, power relationships, and the sense of the grotesque.

This explains perhaps the marked presence of color which seems to become fluid, an element of value in itself, independent of any descriptive or referential intentions. And along with this use of color is his interest in fragmentation, in revealing textures that emerge from the skin, from wood, or from a mineral, combining them in such a way that they become inter-related and a source of suggestive discoveries.

But his photographs have another characteristic: we cannot always see what is being recorded. The images are given an air of imprecision through the use of photographic techniques which allow dramatically ordinary situations to be presented in a poetic, almost baroque fashion. And it is this baroque element that runs through all of Rio Branco's work, from his early photographs of prostitutes in the Maciel district in Bahia (1976) down to his recent photographs of boxers from Santa Rosa. 

IVONNE PINI