I am expected to say something relevant in these lines about the photographic works that make up this book, as well as, in general, about the work of its author. A practical task like this easily falls into a, so to speak, competent but insignificant exercise, if I am to limit myself to write an appendix that repeats the commonplaces expected by an audience specialized in photography, that is, if I am to limit myself to the enumeration of the facts that everyone, more or less, already knows, an audience familiar with contemporary discourses on the subject that frame the works (and its authors) in the several trends and typologies of production in the world of art. However puerile the debate about whether art dispenses discourses around it, or whether art should rather be an immersive world into which we plunge with astonishment, mainly for our pure pleasure, this is a theme that I necessarily keep alive when I write about it. The relevance of the discourse, both for the theoretical framework of the works themselves, and for the richness of the experience of those who see them and read me is, therefore, a target that haunts my reflexions as I seek to illuminate them with the production of my own discourse. And the answer I give to the content of this debate always ends up being a yes, that is, I say yes to all the yes and all the no raised by discussions on this topic. Does art need discourse? — Yes! Does art dispense with discourse — Yes! How serious can the discourse about art be? — It can be totally serious, and it can lack all seriousness. The phrase by poet Paul Celan that precedes these lines clearly identifies the need in us that allows our movement towards the relevant discourse and the acquisition (if beforehand we don’t have it) of the faculty of knowing something: metaphorically, we must place this pair of eyes from the depths of our soul onto our chest. But I also used his words to elicit doubt in what, in the end, Celan says, in the sense that I have also the strong impression that it is impossible to know what a work of art actually conveys. Every movement that is rigorously directed towards discourse respects, in some way, a system with foundations more attached to belief than to reason, which is equivalent to say that a deep-rooted apriorism serves, so to speak, as guide to a discourse set in motion to reach to a safe place. This place is nothing more than the consummation of the idea that a given premise requires the sole conclusion that corresponds to it. More than the discursive logic itself, it is, therefore, belief and some previous convictions to sustain and make the discourse cohesive. Under these conditions logic accommodates itself without being harmed. But this is a severe difficulty for the writer with disbelief, the writer with few convictions and reduced certainties, like myself. In everything that is non-discursive there might also be some knowledge, and without doubt there is a knowledge that penetrates us when we give a portion of our lifetime to the fruition of a work of art: it is an intimate experience. This interiority is not the knowledge of something revealed by the work of art, this remains inaccessible and indecipherable in it. At most, we can enumerate the components of the object we see and objectively describe the way it shows them. This a kind of knowledge that comes from us, a kind of knowledge that results from the experience of an immersive self in the act of reducing the dimension of what it does not know, because, to a certain extent, the self changes, even if discreetly, upon seeing the work of art. The relevance of the work of art could even be assessed by how much it changes me. This is, therefore, a knowledge of oneself through art.

         I came into contact with many of the works present in this book by David Infante at different times in my life. Therefore, it is with the awareness of having a personal story that relates, in a way, to them, that, when publishing this book, I once again turn inwards, to the memory of what I saw. While revising it I’m taking a second look but now without vision, and I elaborate an intricate parade of beings, their reflections and shadows; of sand, earth, atmosphere and (photographic) grain; of water, ice, liquefaction and solidification; of paths, roads, traces and rubbing outs, whether near or far; and suddenly I find myself in a strange exercise of “pantheonymy”^[1]. In my memory, again, a parade of these images. In one of them, the photosensitive salts’ grain mimes the grain of beach sand reproduced by it. And how beautiful is this grain that reproduces something so similar to itself that it can be said, in a symbolic level, that the photographic grain seeks to penetrate the reality of which it is itself the index, in such a way that it can take it, as materiality, to the structure of the reality of art? This is the same grain that, while equalizing the tonal values of the atmosphere and the ground, spills the former onto the latter. It’s an unlikely fusion — the horizon line that we expected to see on the edge of that fringe of sea dissolves, disappears: sky and ground become the same thing. The horizon line, therefore, remains only a separation of water and air, that is, of the elements where no feet can stand. In another landscape, the photographic grain reproduces sand crisscrossed by the convergence, directed towards a vanishing point, of the marks drawn in straight line by the tires of a vehicle (absent from the image). The trail was intercepted and crumbled (by a sea wave?). If this was the case, the two protagonists of the scene (sea wave and vehicle) are absent of the image and we are left with the representation of an action occurred in the past in which, however, its subjects do not appear.

         This theme of a path that is lost or interrupted, or that of a being in movement that becomes immobilized, gets a different treatment in other works by David Infante — in the meandering snake immobilized in a granular but dense material, difficult to identify; in alpine landscapes whose verticality disappears into a band of clouds or horizontal shadow that completely hides a portion of the ascending gaze.

       What is, after all, this absence of an intuited presence? — Death? — The photograph representing itself?

     But to look again, inwardly, at these images is to reach a state of undone stare. Time given to an effective viewing is an intimate act and, in it, turns into expansion. And if now I effectively stare again at these images, it doesn’t take me long to reach the point where the relationship between the eye and the image is no longer an act of seeing, but once again a blindfolded immersion. It doesn’t mean that the gaze has become irrelevant, not at all — the gaze, even when of tired eyes, is, under these conditions, and at every moment, inaugural. The intensified gaze loses itself, imbued in the silent and discreet becoming of the signifier. Therefore, I am not talking about the eye, but about the dog whelk, and I’m no longer dealing with the visible. Firstly, I deal with the curiosity that arrests the gaze in the object; secondly, aroused, curiosity leads me to seek remote audibility, symbolized by the concavity beyond which one cannot see, a faint audibility (silenced, perhaps) intuited in these photographs. My ears are filled with that silence-of-hollows where the visible casts into the chasm, they retrace invisible paths, because these images are inhabited by the invisible which is the silenced that covers them. The invisible cannot be traversed but can be conceived as a reinvention into something else that, imaginarily, heads towards the riverbed, towards the abyss reached through the absurdity of this magnifying glass that frames the concavity of the dog-whelk. In other compositions, those that, at first visual contact, are perhaps the most striking, the human figure appears involved in a violent apparatus that sometimes is a veil, sometimes a rudimentary sculpture device, interposed between the portrayed person and the portrait photographer (and, therefore, also between them and the viewer of the work of art). This objectively absurd addition to the setting and to the characterization of those portrayed, is an expression of a feeling of insufficiency, that is to say: seeing what things appear to be is not enough: countenance and gaze are too linked to the very thin blade of the moment (of the present) to be able to aspire to the representation of the supposed truth of being. These objects, these veils, are thus an incision on the appearance of the other (and of oneself), a fragile, anguished, but precious expression of hope: that the unusual action can inspire the spectator’s inner vision for effective signs, not of the persona, but of the unique, unveiled character of the inner life of the beings represented in the image. Paradoxical images, since they result from the acts of hiding and distorting the visible to show what was previously unseen, these photographs are assumed to be portraits without portraiture. Aware that they are, in advance, of the expression of truth as an impossible supplement to identity (of the impossibility of Barthes’ air), theirs is a search for the deliberate failure of the purpose intuited in them, in the name of a clarifying moral position towards the human world and an ethical position towards (photographic) art. By blatantly refusing the exercise of exegesis on the content, they force instead the imagined reconstruction of the method, showing it in this failed decipherment: faced with the desperation of the incisive gesture on the image, the being remains hidden, reaffirming the hermeticism of the individual in the indecipherable. From the entire process, what remains, finally, is the sign of faith in what is the most complete stronghold of freedom: each human mind, as a unique entity. The moment is decisive only because it is irreversible, it is not decisive in the aestheticization of supposed truths converging towards the moment of capture. In the images in which David Infante uses ice as a substantial element of both composition and action, distortion becomes even more violent, and the author’s reflection on the ontology of the photographic image also more conscious and revolted. The addition of liquid matter, its solidification, extraction and liquefaction constitute, in sequence, the complex field of visual possibilities that led to these works of art. The cutting in time at the core of the process becomes equivalent to a glimpse of meaning in the metaphorical, whose richness is not unrelated to the unusual literalness of the linguistic game. Otherwise, let’s examine: understanding the photographic mirror in the light of the first and primary discourse on photography (using the words of Philippe Dubois), these photographs show an experience of image construction that uses the ice itself to refreeze the image of a time-space. Accepting, therefore, the cliche that photography freezes space and time, in these photographs ice is the broken mirror which, when liquefied, is also the metaphor for fading in time. What we objectively see in the process of construction of the image as an additive act, we interpret on the contrary as ongoing decomposition, everything in them is, therefore, an emphasis of the critique of falsehood: of the performative act, of the constructed pose of those portrayed (in a certain lack of “naturalness”), in some cases of doubt as to their effective presence before the photographer, in short, of the very nature of photography as a mirror and trace of the real. David Infante’s photographic art avoids the stand point of a testimony to the visuality of an extrinsic reality, since it is not directly in this extrinsic reality that he seeks the sources of his showing act — he prefers in first place to provide material and subsequently subtract it, making a record of what is soon lost — his images are the possible remains of fleeting sculptures, they are admittedly a construction of reality and not its mere reproduction.

^[1] From “Panteonímia”, Portuguese word meaning study of the proper names of the stars, winds, animals, supernatural beings, things, etc.