Extreme faces

1 Roberto Schmitt-Prym is a unique case in Brazilian photography. He is a Francis Bacon without brushes. And as in Bacon work, some of his images are retreated into retorted, macerated, shapeless faces beyond —or perhaps beneath —ordinary perception of facial features. We don´t know even whether these creatures imply some tortured, unbearable quotidian that dissipates our humanity. Towards these vague men and women (women, mainly) worked by Robert, we forthrightly catch a dissolution of forms. This dissolution is maybe the pinnacle of an answer; an answer not to an unassailable pain of the onlooker, but an answer to a dully and daily estrangement towards our own biological narrative. Thus this choice for a distorted photography, reworked through invasive “methods” (it seems) that replace it into a realistic, physical purity which is loyal to appearance precepts. His dedication to the dismantling of his images evokes a feeling of religious vigor… Towards the human system completely beguiled by a series of pleas that keep it from its integrity, remains a kind of damnation of the forms, a certain decline of what we could get of our traits long forgotten, when the mirror was able to keep from us an image of a promise not yet counterfeited. Now the rage of the face is fixed into a reversed glory that tortures until the artist’s eye can rise against body matter of everydayness. This carnal instrumentation —which constitutes us in absence of ourselves, corrupted by an escapist “beauty”— inhabits a massive circuit —pure fetish in a constant disposable condition, thus obscene… And Roberto Schmitt-Prym is the right artist for this task. Unique and able for such incursion thru the hells of our physical content till the point that towards his work we recognize that we are fabling, an atrocious and forgetful fable of that we someday were able to glimpse in the dreams of our visage. Photographer of a terrifying intimacy, Roberto reveals a carnality which is above any order, even more outraged than what the mirror can endure. By this almost satanical transgression comes his virtuosity, obsessive in his procedures, fixed on the deformed traits of some “models”—who submit themselves to the brutal touch of the photographer, as if just this way they could express an arrested chimera. It´s this fixation in some crinkled traits that sometimes gives the work the tone of a abstract painting. The artist’s “cruelty” can, indeed, release his human prototypes, even temporarily. Nobody leaves such ravaging situation the same; it´s almost an epic towards the end of an identity.

2 But this photographer, however, is even bigger than that. As from his lens rises another view in a way contradictory. On this view we apprehend women with a half-smile, sloping eyes, many times bathed in whiteness, in tiny and flowing sceneries —a sensorial metaphysics: a sensation that we are before a bliss on the verge to get itself lost, leaving us in a distressed nostalgia. A serious deficit. Who they are? Why they make us suffer even before this escape to nowhere? Here is the artist, creating a so beautiful feminine that towards her we don’t feel safe to remain. This series is so gorgeous, from that so many effluvium emanate that we have no hands to catch them. The best would be to give our unconsciousness the task to take pictures of what is already a photograph, and just after this, in a unexpected hole of the mind, reconstitute the soft pleasure of theses creatures in flowing secrets, not to speak in mysterious moments, leaving a “clear enigma”. Two kindled candles, a veil on the visage, face diluted on whiteness —here there are the signs of a vestal many times more than insinuating… It is on this part that the photographer better express his fatal fondness. Each one of his works seems to tell us that the world needs to flow, and that it needs to take the images before they cannot give their selves any longer. Roberto is so unique that hurts. And always leave us perplexed. So we want more. And more.

            João Gilberto Noll - writer