I decided to use a middle format camera and you cannot find housings in the market for this type of camera. Once again, the process of the work is a fundamental part of my work, actually build a underwater housing it was the real beginning of this project, then the decision to use a 6x6 camera and then how the water was supposed to act in the construction of the final images. For me the result of all this series of photographs, is how we deal with the water and how this element could transform our perception of the environment around us. The theme of landscape is very recurrent in your imagery and it never plays the role of a mere background: you rather seem to address to viewers to extract a narrative behind the images you select, to establish direct relations with the spectatorship. How would you describe the function of the evokative places you select for your photographs?The landscape that you can see in my work, reflects the spirit in which I find myself at that time. Mostly reflects all the feelings and experiences that I am going through. I like to think that the locations chose me instead of me choosing the locations. I know that can sounds frivolous and shallow but isn’t, since I have been working very hard to be the most honest as possible to my self, I believe that the reason to be in some place at some specific time is more than my personal desire. I do think is a reflection of my most deep desires mix with my tireless disposal to travel and see new places, meet new people and most important, have new life experiences mix with my most deep memories as well, memories that sometimes I don’t even know where they come from or even that I had them.We like the way Silencio snatches the essence of emptiness and anonymity dued to human presence has reminded us the notion of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc AugÈ: artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your view about this?“SilÍncio” (silence) is in some way is a sequence of the project “Transitional Frames”, where I approach the loneliness of the photographer’s work and the middle of the journey. Usually people worry about the beginning or the end of a journey, but in this work, I focus completely in the middle of the journey. In SilÍncio I want to reach the silence of the loneliness. I spend a lot of my time by my self and my goal on this project basically it was to find the silence in a very remote locations, probably to listen my own thoughts and learn a lit bit more about my self. I see the artist role not only to unveil what is in beneath the surface but 33Ricardo Fasanello LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
show to the public, what are the multiple sides and angles that I can find around us, my particular point of view and try to give my feelings and emotion on the subject. I believe everyone can look what is out there but only who is searching will be able to see the different layers that exist on all things around us. On these days, people are not stopping anymore to observe what is out there, they don’t want to full experience anymore, being there is enough and often not even that. With a consistent focus on the themes of urban environment, you seem to be inspired by your travels as well as the bohemian neighborhood of Santa Teresa in Rio where you spent your childhood. So we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience? It’s possible but isn’t as well. How can I say it's my work if I do not commit to it. I think the truly artist is the one that can reach the most deep thoughts and feeling in the most inside part of our heart and then bring out and transform it in a tool of communication through the element that you choose to use, photography, painting, music and etc… To be absolute honest to my believes, I have to question myself every 36LandEscape Ricardo FasanelloCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
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38LandEscape Ricardo FasanelloCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
moment. I have to be alert to never be dishonest with myself. I have to have doubts and always prove my self to myself, many times only through my experiences, I am able to know that I am on the right track, otherwise what would be the meaning of having so much experience if you don’t embrace it.While encapsulating elements from reality, your works, and especially the ones from the Transitional Frames series, capture nonsharpness and bring to a new level of significance the elusive still ubiquitous relationship between experience and memory. What is the role of memory in your process? A very important role. Memory for me is everything. I like to think that most of my work is a kind of reenact of my memories, everything is already there. I just have some glimpse from time to time, with images and a kind of déja-vu of many different memories. I realize that been a romantic, doesn’t help much but I cannot fight what I am. I think my work is a kind of rescue of my memories to bring up and show me the real Ricardo. I understand that my personal work is the most powerful tool that I have at my disposal to know myself deeply and I have been using a lot.German photographer Thomas Ruff stated once: \"nowadays you don't 39Ricardo Fasanello LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
have to paint to be an artist. You can use photography in a realistic way. You can even do abstract photographs\". What is your opinion about the importance of photography in the contemporary art? This is a very delicate issue for me. We well know that photography freed the painters of the late nineteenth century, taking the function of recording History but when photography became widely used as another tool in Art, I realize that artists who use photography nowadays but who were professional photographers in the past tend to have a work that could be easily classified as part of the modernist movement, why? Because they still care a lot about the focus, the perfect exposure of the film or whether the horizon is crooked or not. Important issues but not when we talk about Art that we have nowadays. I see artists from another background, much freer and much more concerned with the meaning of work than technical details. I believe that photography has to go through a revolution within it in order to find itself again and thus free itself from all the bonds that distance it from its true potential. Over your career you have had five solos and you showcased your work in several group exhibitions, including recent participation to Pocket 40Escape Ricardo FasanelloCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEWLand
41Ricardo Fasanello LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
42LandEscape Ricardo FasanelloCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
43Ricardo Fasanello LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEWCollection, at the Olympics Special Edition - Galeria Monique Paton, Rio de Janeiro. One of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?Absolute not. And I know some people will freak-out, but I do my photography for myself and myself only. It’s my need or we can say, it’s my call. I have to do, I have to photograph to keep my mind as close as possible to my sanity and photography has a very important role on that. For example, I am already thinking about a new project, this work that will be another huge turn over in my work, is going to have people on it and in the same time the city that I live today, Rio de Janeiro. I know already that some people will say that this new work has some traces of social approach but absolute not. This new work is more about myself and my relation with my hometown that I have been refusing to photograph almost my entire life, I see a great opportunity to rebuild my relationship
with Rio (my hometown) that has been apart for all this years. But when we talk about showing the work, that is a complete different relation with the audience, because I don’t think I have to please the public but I cannot underestimate their intelligence, I have to reach them in the level that we can communicate, that is my main goal when I show my work. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Ricardo. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?As I wrote in the previous question, my upcoming work is about my relationship with my hometown, Rio. But I can add that for me today, reach a new and bigger audience is my number one priority, in the pass ten years I have been working a lot but I didn’t have so many individual exhibition, for many different reason but the bottle line is that I want to show more and more my work and of course consolidate my name in a very, very competitive market. As most of the artist in the world, we need to eat, drink and most important, finance our projects that are to come...LandEscape Ricardo FasanelloCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW42An interview by Katherine Williams, curatorand Josh Ryder, [email protected]
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Nadav Ofer
Visual artist and photographer Nadav Ofer's work explores the aesthetics of reality to draw the viewers into a multilayered experience. In the body of works that we'll be discussing in the following pages, he invites the viewers to extract a narrative from the image he captured, to challenge their perceptual categories. His approach encapsulates both traditional heritage and unconventional sensitiveness and allows him to produce pieces marked out with a strong reference to contemporariness. One of the most impressive aspects of Ofer's work is the way it provides the apparent staticity of an image with an autonomous life and aesthetics: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to his stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.Hello Nadav and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. How did you start your journey into photography? An interview by Katherine Williams, curatorand Josh Ryder, [email protected] ART REVIEWLandEscape meetsNadav Ofer
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26LandEscape Tal Amitai-LaviCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Tal Amitai-Lavi27LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
28Are there any experiences that have particularly influenced the way you conceive and produce your works? Hello and thank you for inviting me. Starting off as a photographer (photography was my initial aspiration), my motivation was different from my current occupation. I intended to do documentary and journalism photography. I wanted to tour the world and capture war zones and remote jungle trails. It never happened. Instead, I enrolled to study photography. There, besides technical things, I discovered and learned the language of art, and it completely altered my interest in photography. At first, I engaged in direct photography, documenting places. I would walk around with a large camera and a heavy tripod, taking photographs. It was romantic. Working in a dark room also contributed to that notion. I felt I was doing good, interesting things, but the result was always a disappointment. It took awhile to learn how to quiet the background noise. It was a long process. The language you convey in your works is the result of a constant evolution of your searching for new means to express the ideas you explore in your works: your inquiry LandEscape Nadav OferCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
29Nadav Ofer LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
30LandEscape Nadav OferCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
into the expressive potential of photography combines together figurative as subtle abstract feature into a coherent balance. Would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up? In particular, would you shed light on your main sources of inspiration?One principle I have aquired, that has guided my work process, is minimizing. The act of reduction is the key element of the work, no matter if it is still photography or video work, no matter what the work is about. I always clean the frame from the unnecessary, leaving only the essential. Not just as an aesthetic ideal, I think it makes the work easier to comprehend. I do not think art should be an enigma. As a viewer, guessing the artist's intent is frustrating, and it is important to me that my intention comes through. I am inspired by good art. Interesting work drives me to create. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of LandEscape, and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article, has at once captured our attention of your work is its dynamic and autonomous aesthetics: in particular, it seems to communicate a successful attempt to transform staticity to 31Nadav Ofer LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
tension, and it's really captivating. How do you choose your subjects? Do you have an actual image or photograph in mind? Are you working from a typological model or is it more intuitive and experiential? I do not have a specific or defined method to my work. Sometimes I have a clear idea, I know what I am looking for, and I set out in search for the material. Working on the \"Scab\" photo series, I knew what I wanted to do in advance. I lived in Jerusalem, in the heart of a city condensed with religion and politics, perhaps the most complicated city in the world, and I looked for its edges. Where it meets nature, desolation, the desert. The margins are less stifling and there is something about them that is undone. I wandered around these areas, and realized that they too are marred by politics. The theme of landscape is very recurrent in your imagery and it never plays the role of a mere background: you rather seem to address to viewers to extract a narrative behind the images you select, to establish direct relations with the spectatorship. How would you describe the function of the evokative places you select for your photographs? I think every photographer is a wanderer, by nature. Wandering is an 32LandEscape Tal Amitai-LaviCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
33Tal Amitai-Lavi LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
investigative act. I usually look for places away from the city's noise, places that aren't complete nature and that hold a trace of human presence, beginnings or leftovers. They hold a sculptural .element, that I love, and are somewhat like documenting someone else's art We like the way your works accomplish the difficult task of controling the experience of place to explore the aesthetics reality. In particular, the equilibrium concerning the composition of your photographs gives them a permanence to the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the images that you capture. So we would take 36LandEscape Nadav OferCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?The camera, more than a mirror or window, serves as a filter, distorting reality and changing it. Photographers use this function to enslave reality into their needs. The camera has the ability to frame a detail in a certain place or occurrence, and to take it out of context. Finally, photography is a manipulation. 37Nadav Ofer LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
As photographer Thomas Ruff stated once: \"nowadays you don't have to paint to be an artist. You can use photography in a realistic way. You can even do abstract photographs\". What is your opinion about the importance of photography in the contemporary art?38LandEscape Nadav OferCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
As the curator of the Mapplethorpe retrospective, David Hockey said of the work: \"It's nice, but it's just photography\". From early on, photography needed to fight for it's place in the art world. In my opinion, direct photography is limited. To me, as an artist, the ability to 39Nadav Ofer LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
document, is also the greatest weakness of photography. I try to transcend these limitations by self definition. If I am defined an artist, and not a photographer, my options are broader. We like the way you have snatched the essence of emptiness and anonymity dued to human presence has reminded us the notion of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc Augé: artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner 40Escape Nadav OferCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEWLand
Nature... what's your view about this? Countless ideas emanate from observing the surrounding. Artists have a different perception of the world around them. Every outing to the streets is an attempt to bring forth an interesting happenstance out of reality. To illuminate it, frame it, interpret it differently within the artistic creation. While encapsulating elements from reality, your works capture nonsharpness and bring to a new level of significance the elusive still ubiquitous relationship between 41Nadav Ofer LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
42LandEscape Nadav OferCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEWexperience and memory. What is the role of memory in your process? Memory being a component of photography, is a popular notion. That photography is something of an efficient trap of our surrounding reality. But memory, even the photographic kind, is selective and can lead astray . My work \"Proof\" is about the deception of photographic memory, the disability of photography to serve as a reliable source. I chose well-known historical photos and changed them through shooting and reprinting, in keeping with the photo's realism. The video art \"The Same Sea\", where the sun rises in the west, also conveys this. One of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?Through the creation of art, I have a dialogue with myself, but it is a conversation spoken out loud, and in the end, everyone is listening . Artists create out of an internal need, but every writer wants to be published. We want to exhibit, and get feedback on our work, not out of pretensions. Recognition is on the other side of the artistic creation, but the creation process must be detached from that, and the artist's choices, all of them, must be intrinsic to the artist himself, without any thought of the viewers. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Nadav. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?As an artist usually using still photography and video, I would like to get \"off the wall\" and fill the space. To create with other materials. Regarding photography, I think I'm diverting from direct photography, from documenting. Today I prefer to discuss the medium and create things which their basis is an idea. The aesthetic is a bonus.An interview by Katherine Williams, curatorand Josh Ryder, [email protected]
43Nadav Ofer LandEscapeCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW