CARNIVAL ON CANVAS

"The canvas is the curtain between excess and what they actually want to see", Rogério Reis says in the introduction to his book On Canvas. Over the years catorze, Roger photographed the carnival in Rio de Janeiro and this exhibition is a selection of images produced in that period.

The portrait is of significance portrayed, distinguish it. Already canvas brings the focus to the individual, confused with the crowd before. Highlighting the revelers context, Rogério and the magnificent, in its stage - the canvas - makes them protagonists.

The images show the inventiveness and creativity of reveler, that improvises and creates fantasies with precarious materials, emphasizing the exaggeration and excess. His collection bequeathed to posterity a wealth of faces, masks, fantasies and human types, where lies the voice of audacity, the courage to transgress, the inversion of values. The images of the photographer - done in black and white - make the Carnival, which is colored by nature, something almost unreal.

The plain background - canvas - made famous great French portraitist and is a feature that accompanies the photographers since the beginning of photography, as a way to enhance the customer who commissioned the portrait. In Century 19, various photographers in Brazil viviam utilizaram-not: Marc Ferrez, Alberto Henschel, Augusto Stahl ou Christiano Jr..

The neutral background - be it paper, canvas, cloth; a wall or anything that highlights the surrounding pictured - is a resource used today, since it is essentially connected to the represent. Launch of such artifice of fashion photographers to photojournalists. Irving Penn, that ahead of an infinite set of background models haute couture to nomads of the Sahara, said, once: "I preferred more limited task: occupy myself only to the person, away from the incidents of his daily life, simply wearing her clothes and ornaments, isolated in my studio ".

It is interesting to note that the neutral background is not used, when interest is portrayed the contextualizing. For Roger, the context was not necessary: isolated, revelers seem, sometimes, with sculptures. So, carrying the message, much more social than aesthetic, also stands.

Every picture is a death mask, an illusion that can stop time. Every picture confronts us with our finitude. But we are at the carnival and delicious photographs of Rogério Reis make us experience the joy that life can give us.

Joaquim Paiva
Rio de Janeiro, November 2009