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Adolfo Montejo
Despite his reluctance to identify spiritually with any one country, preferring to embrace several cultures that have acquired a certain brotherhood over the years, such as the Spanish, the French, the North American and the Brazilian - or perhaps because of it -Miguel Rio Branco (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 1946) is one of the most international of Brazilian photographers. Any approach to his photographic poetics must salute the pervasive aesthetic 'trinity' that leads from colour to texture and from texture to mystery, or from the morphology of deconstructed realism to the semantics of poetic icons. Indeed, the imagery of Miguel Rio Branco pertains to a realism that may lose its grip on the reality principle at times, but never on the poetic principle. Deconstruction is possible thanks to the chameleon nature of reality - never fixed, always fluid - and to the non-documental eye of the photographer, turning it into symbols. Thus the theme is never an issue, but rather a concept, one that remains crucially unpredetermined and open to transformation. "Between the real and the unreal, the physical and the metaphysical, the sacred and the profane, the whole and the fragment, the man and the beast"; borderline states are suggested by these words of Ligia Canongia's, inducing us to place no limits on the scope of Rio Branco's photographic operations, for in them, each image overflows its ostensible content.
Equipped with a meticulous author's bibliography, books such as Dulce Sudor Amargo, Nakta, Miguel Rio Branco, Silent Book and Pele do Tempo are imbued with the poetics of colour in dialogue with the capaciousness of imagery: how many of these pictures seem to talk through their colours! The demands of expression were always the leitmotif of the shifts in perception he has undergone in deploying his photography on the horizon of the plastic arts. And for several decades, he has presented his work in an array of materials and supports, including electronic elements and soundtracks, tending ever more toward a plural photography, open to the four winds and to the utopia in which images might not only be intrinsically related to cinema or painting, but also to poetry and music. The sequential, almost cinematic association from picture to picture that characterises this artist inclines increasingly to a visual linking suggesting a musical photography, practically a set of compositions, in keys laid down by collage, montage and melody. During the course of the following interview, conducted in his Santa Teresa studio in Rio one long, hot January afternoon, this lover of an art that matters, far removed from the 'lite' flavours of a certain contemporaneity, confesses the scars of other tattoos and speaks of his affinities with jazz and baroque, and of the presence of the atavistic forces of Eros and Thanatos in his archaeology of what exists. Having explored the crannies of shadow, Miguel Rio Branco wishes to scrutinise the dramatic facets of light. The dark skill of his art proceeds onward. This is why, perhaps, none of his pictures are innocent. - Surveying your work as a whole, from Dulce sudor amargo or Coração espelho da carneto to the recent Pele do tempo, it strikes one as a mapping-out of the body. My work has a lot to do with the skin, for that is the surface connecting us to the world, in pleasure as much as in pain. Skin is a dialogue between outside and inside, a separation that is also a connection. (…)
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