ANDRÉ CEPEDA. DEPOIS 

This exhibition gathers a series of recent photographs by Andre Cepeda, taken in Oporto the city where the artist lives and a recurrent topic of his work. The collection of images suggests a physical – and mental – journey through various sites in a city where human presence is residual. During this journey, this meander, André Cepeda photographs a wide range of subjects, including deserted streets, the façades of buildings, rudimentary constructions, monuments, ruins, and abandoned materials and objects in settings permeated by melancholy and a sense of emptiness. It is a view that is harsh and sensitive, meditative and critical, which reacts to space, matter, and light, bestowing certain places and objects with a character that is at once familiar and strange, banal and mysterious. Nothing appears to happen in these places.

There are no discernible movements or gestures. A petrified world, deathly silent, where all that remains are spaces, constructions, and objects that point to a prior history. Depois is a work about what remains, but also about our desires and about what we are prepared to see in and make of the images, to reclaim the need for an ethics of observation and reflection on all the sites of abandonment and oblivion.

Curator 

Sérgio Mah