The work of art develops together with those who do it, one develops the other. You begin to think from him in the same way that he begins to think from what you believe. He has a life of his own.
With a bachelor's degree in photography from Centro Universitário Senac SP, Carlos Matos works with different artistic practices such as photography, video, sculpture and installation. He investigates the post-colonial relations active in the present, contemporary migrations and the resulting imaginary, drawing boundaries between his investigations into the poetics of light, space, and line.
Learn more about the artist's work and trajectory in the interview below.
CM: Tell us a bit about your trajectory so far. How did you start developing your work? What was the initial motivation behind your artwork?
The work of art develops together with those who do it, one develops the other. You begin to think from him in the same way that he begins to think from what you believe. He has a life of his own. I started shooting, and this is a habit that I like a lot but it's kind of stuck with me; I don't feel so horny about the images anymore. I think that, based on this lack of enthusiasm, I tried and still try, to unify what I like the most, what pleases me, in the field of the image but without going to photography. I'm interested in space, portraits, how to bring visibility to what doesn't seem so visible to us, you know? But without photographing that, work not only with the figures but also with what they represent and say behind a primary visuality.
CM: Based on the notion of circular time, how do you see the dialogue between your work and the new technologies and methods that have emerged in recent years? Are technologies such as 3D, augmented reality and artificial intelligence present in any way in your experimentations?
I think these new technologies are very badass, both in and of themselves but also because they greatly encourage the imaginary. They are new tools that can say new things because they exist in new contexts and problems in the world. There's that conversation that all subjects have already been portrayed right, what changes is how they are portrayed. I agree with that statement. Pain, love, joy, depression, all of this has been talked about for hundreds of years. But today's problems, which involve technology, FOMO, these things, are new subjects and call for new tools. These new tools are not directly in my work and for now I don't know how they could satisfy my desires, I have to think better with them; but in any case, they are with me because they represent a new possibility of portraiture and this is something that interests me a lot.
CM: Do you believe that your research contributes to the creation of methods that investigate a new “cartography of the sensitive”?
Cartography itself, the term, already gives us something accurate, precise, a map. Have you ever thought about having a map that doesn't take you anywhere? It wouldn't be a map.
Then you try to map a sensibility, it's a very difficult exercise because one term already denies the other right. Trying to provide a point of contact between these two things is very complicated for a work of art, which is why sometimes it takes us to places that are not very certain. It's not possible for work to always follow the same path, because it's not a map, which promises you something; that's where the sensitivity comes from, to shuffle everything. I believe that my work, while informing, also confuses because it precisely inhabits this place of sensitive cartography.
