Albano Fernandes Afonso (São Paulo, SP, 1964). Visual artist. He studied at the Faculdade de Arte Alcântara Machado (Faam) in Santos, São Paulo. In 1994, he held his first solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural São Paulo (CCSP), in the city of São Paulo. In the same year he receives an award at the 21º Salão de Arte Contemporânea de Santo André and the acquisition prize of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Santo André. In 2006 the publisher Dardo, from Santiago de Compostela, Spain, launches a book about the artist.
It is impossible to avoid the sensation of corrosion aroused by Albano Afonso's series Viagem à Selva Tropical, shown in 1999 at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM/SP). His procedure consists in repeatedly perforating reproductions in digital photography of paintings by masters such as Rugendas (1802-1858) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), scattering empty circles over the surface of the work, thus revealing parts of another image placed in the background. The artist is therefore not dealing with any corrosive or abrasive materials, yet from a distance these surfaces convey something worn, rusty, even blistered.
This false appearance of decomposition triggers an ambiguity of meaning: between a criticism of art history and a nostalgia for it. At the same time, it operates an inversion in one of painting's fundamental conceptual pairs - depth and surface. Afonso chooses to reproduce pictorial works that have as a central concern the reproduction of the sensation of depth, via perspective resources.
Now, by interfering on the image of these works, by perforating them, Afonso imposes to the spectator's eyes the flat surface of the work, managing to evidence what was previously denied, making the source of the work's sense emanation transfer to the concrete surface, abandoning the illusionist intention.
ALBANO Afonso. In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: <http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa19404/albano-afonso>. Accessed on: June 26, 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7