RETURN TO SILVER

From image to sound, the several register procedures are , one by one, becoming obsolete in face of the technological developments which are opening the door of oblivion for them.

In that context, oblivion becomes a source of innovation for infinite possibilities of recovery where techniques, if obsolete, undergo new processes of regeneration transporting yesterday to the full light of now, reshaping the original meaning of intentions.

This, in my view, is the essence of the work at the source of this important exhibition of photographer and architect Manuel Magalhães.

The role of the author in this exhibition is cast, from the standing point of the photographer, with that of the artisan and of the creator-intervention operator.

As a photographer he registers, not just through look, the anticipated reading of the act of intervention that will be operated afterwards simultaneously granting image an original support from the beginning: silver paper, sensitized by exposure to light of a traditional film ridden with silver nitrate.

Redundancy filled with extremely beautiful memories of recovery of the time inscribed on the surface of his photo-paintings, reborn in colourings of will.

From a symbolically and chemically present return to the tradition of silver emerges the unique piece, the work of art issuing from the recovery-intelligence of the author in simulations of plans partly hand coloured in an exercise that unites photography and painting and in that practice redeems the traditional processes of sensitising the silver nitrate.

As always, the ransom of time is its redeeming metaphor, achieved in the complete here and now of language.

The photographer, the painter or, generally, the creator have a duty to generate the present, often by redeeming locked away memory.

Thus, as in all returns, - metaphoric as they may be - coming to terms with the eternal myth, Manuel Magalhães proposes new languages to a language different from the digitalized image.

Announcing the solitary dialogue between invention and intervention pervaded by the shimmering heraldry, the discreet glow, of the unforgettable speech of his soft days of silver.

António Conceição Júnior