Acrylic Afternoons

Whenever I think of the beach or the sea, my memories are divided into three layers:

The first is childhood: the endless vacations, the long days and naps in tents, the half-awake state, the wind whipping the drying towels and the voices: the mothers warning their children, the street vendors and, of course, the sadness of the high tides during the day and, of course, the last day at the beach and how far away the following year was.

The second is as a teenager: going to the beach with my friends. The feeling of being an adult, the discovery of girls and the inability to talk to them. One of the most striking memories of that time was falling on a block of rocks due to a slip on some seaweed and falling helplessly with the back of my head on the rocks. I've never forgotten the pain, the hematoma on my head or that block of rocks and its exact location, the sound or the sensation of the moment of the fall. For reasons I have not been able to decipher, after adolescence I lost all interest in the beach as a summer activity or form of entertainment.

My third memory is the most recent but no less impactful: At the beginning of 2017, during a series of events, I was at the house of a girl who lived near the same beach I used to go to as a teenager. That night we drank coffee liqueur, smoked a lot of weed and listened to some records from her collection, including “His n Hers” by Pulp, a band we shared great devotion for. I remember that the next morning, apart from the hangover and the smell of the sea, I was sure I was in love.

In the years that followed, I spent most of my time in that house where I took thousands of photographs and amid the noise of the shutter, I could hear the seagulls, some ships arriving and leaving the dock and yet, being so close and present, I hardly ever photographed the sea.

Last year, between simple nostalgia, visits to the archive and commitments to the gallery that represents my work (Galeria Adorna), the absence of the sea became intolerable. I felt an enormous desire to photograph that landscape in an emotive way, avoiding more confessional or landscape approaches to the concepts and recurring representations of the sea.

The sea is a circumscribed territory, but it is always on the move. I felt that this flow was very similar to our memories, sometimes more crystallized and sometimes slowly eroding over time, just like a rock. Inspired by William Turner's notebooks, I used a damaged lens with a dislocation in an optical element that creates some aberrations as well as the impossibility of having a precise focus. This seemed to me to be the ideal tool for this project and to work with the sea, or the landscape as a stain, as metaphorically as possible.

At the same time and in a complementary way, I began to include archive photographs such as "Acrylic Afternoons, 2017" - a polaroid that not only represents the human figure and central to the work, but also includes the inherent error of the medium that would later fit into more recent photographs; and "Madrugada, 2017" - a set of photographs that mark a certain moment in a possible timeline or some videos that have the function of recording the passage of time and including me not only as an artist and maker but also as an active figure, who traverses time, as in the video "Entering/41st Birthday" that marks the celebration of life in a place where it could have been linked to death 28 years earlier.

The title of the work Acrylic Afternoons, besides having a certain idyllic capacity that transports us to an imaginary universe, is also one of the tracks on the album “His n Hers” by Pulp, which as I mentioned above, ends up being an ignitor in the development of this work that is currently in the editing process, to be shown next November at Galeria Adorna, in the city of Porto.

Bruno Silva is part of »Guest Room: Tina Campt & Keisha Scarville«.

Check out his Artist Feature Ermo.