RAR seen by...

O Olhar de José Almeida Pereira
Coleção RAR 2017

José Almeida Pereira proposes a paradox: to overload the image so as to establish an eminently conceptual territory therein. By means of this retinal excess we realize that what determines its quality is precisely related to the demonstration of the "idea of painting", i.e. its conceptual ballast. The science of the power of the image as a performative demonstration of its falsehood, i.e. reiteration of its constitutive artificiality. It is no longer a "window on the world", but rather the passage through deconstructive stages - one of which is its digitisation - that will ultimately be recovered in the saturated final images presented herein.
These final images concern tiny details observed in different places in the RAR Group’s companies that have been mechanically captured (using photography and video) and then processed via computerized image processing programmes. Refraining from direct observation of nature and the machinery represented therein, the diligently applied filter constitutes a core foundation for commenting on the fluctuating states of perception, in particular those traditionally taught in order to understand painting. The discipline of painting expands as a field of the technological possibility of another kind of representation, anchored in a territory of saturated and tense visibility, thereby creating a parallelism with the speed of the images that invade our brains simultaneously. In other words, it is the painting of today that points to the future. (Miguel von Hafe Pérez)