Scope: The journal Visuais is the journal of the Postgraduate Program in Visual Arts at Unicamp since 2015. The journal publishes texts related to the researches in the lines of theory, criticism and history of art, of visual poetry, extending to the broad domain of the fields hybrid and transdisciplinary issues that are articulated in this area of knowledge. The journal receives propositions for the preparation of dossiers, articles, translations, and also publishes visual essays. Proposals for publication in the journal are refereed by its editorial committee. Qualis Evaluation: A2 (ARTES) Knowledge Area: Linguística, Letras e Artes Founded: 2015 ISSN: 2447-1313 Abbreviated title: Rev. Visuais E-mail: rvisuais@unicamp.br Unit: IA Responsible editor: Mauricius Martins Farina DOI Prefix: 10.20396
This article investigates how the political dimension of artworks intensifies in dictatorial regimes or governments that restrict cultural and artistic practices. The oppression on the artist and individuals results in the political impregnation of art, standing out as a crucial aspect of tensions in artistic practices. This study analyzes how the politics of images acts as a subversive and resistance agent, circumventing censorship and conservative attacks. Four artistic productions will be examined in the Brazilian context, two contemporary (2015-2022) and two from the period of the Military Dictatorship (1964-1985).
Copyright (c) 2025 Revista Visuais https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The poetic practice investigated by Jorge de Lima in his photomontages published in 1943 in the book A Pintura em Pânico.
The article analyzes the form of four photomontages from the book A Pintura em Pânico (1943) by the poet Jorge de Lima and uses the couplets and texts external to the book (critical essays, biographical accounts, interviews, poems) to explore the multiplicity of subjects and themes addressed by the poet through his montages. The theme of the crisis of modernity and the fragmentation of unity was selected to confront the montages. In this sense, the study draws on Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1970), on Surrealism, and on the critique of the modernization process experienced in Brazil during the 20th century, in coherence with the poet’s critical reception.
The essay proposes the concept of lacunar aesthetics as a critical-analytical category of contemporary art, characterized by practices that operate through absence, failure, silence, and interruption as ethical and political forms of expression. This aesthetic rejects the direct representation of limit-experiences, considering that their symbolization may lead to the trivialization or aestheticization of pain. Instead, it values the void as an intensified form of presence and resistance. This aesthetic is structured by an ethics of containment, which manifests in three main forms of emptiness: absence, omission, and excess. From this perspective, the article presents a critical view of dominant symbolic regimes, proposing the lacuna as both language and strategy of critical memory and resistance.
When industrial matter becomes experience
This article examines how industrial matter, when removed from its productive context, transcends its utilitarian function and operates as a generator of aesthetic and sensory experience. It argues that materials such as metal, glass, and industrial waste, when reintegrated into the artistic field, activate a phenomenological relationship that engages the observer's body and reorganizes spatial perception. In this process, materiality ceases to be a technical fact and becomes a critical presence that destabilizes traditional regimes of representation, function, and visuality. The research develops through the practices of Pedro Cabrita Reis, Anish Kapoor, and Richard Serra, whose works constitute paradigmatic examples of how industrial matter can reconfigure ways of experiencing and thinking about exhibition space. It is thus argued that contemporary art mobilizes matter beyond the object, transforming it into a conceptual and bodily operator capable of producing new forms of sensibility and thought.
This article is based on the identification of works by Zulmiro de Carvalho presented in exhibition contexts and discussed from the point of view of their conceptual, material, formal and processual exemplarity, providing an overview of his work. The works shown in exhibitions – sculptures and drawings – are complemented by pieces of limited circulation that clarify his role in the cultural context and his position in a personal and social environment. The works under analysis are considered emblematic of the coherence, the consistence and the persistence of the issues addressed, and of their relevance to the understanding of a trajectory that has marked Portuguese sculpture from the 1960s to the present day.
Zulmiro de Carvalho and the Organizing Sense of the World
This article offers an analysis of the sculptural work of Zulmiro de Carvalho, exploring the relationship between his rural origins and the impact of his training at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. It argues that the artist’s trajectory constitutes a poetic transmutation of organic experience into purified geometric forms that function as cultural doubles of the earth. Drawing on Michel Serres’s The Origin of Geometry, the article proposes that geometry, as an act of measuring and ordering the world, offers a key conceptual lens through which to interpret his work. The analysis focuses on the Pórticos series, the Prado do Repouso cenotaph, and the Pórtico do Rio, demonstrating how the sculptor mobilizes body, space, time, light, and void as symbolic devices. It concludes that Zulmiro de Carvalho, from his rural origins, organizes chaos into a poetic, silent, and rigorous cosmos.
António Fernando Monteiro Pereira da Silva
This article examines the conceptual, formal, and phenomenological convergences between Herberto Hélder’s poetics, the evolution of modern sculpture—from Rodin, through Minimalism and Concrete Art—and the sculptural oeuvre of Zulmiro de Carvalho. Drawing on selected texts from Photomaton & Vox (1979), it discusses notions such as “sculpture-object,” “creation of space,” “transmutation,” “silence,” and “line,” and connects them to historical and aesthetic transformations in contemporary three-dimensionality. The analysis includes critical readings of Hélder’s texts, proposing that Zulmiro de Carvalho’s work offers an exemplary embodiment of Hélder’s definition of sculpture as a motor-text—a spatial, relational, and sensorial operative system.
This article will attempt seven approaches to understand the work of Portuguese sculptor Zulmiro de Carvalho. His work spans from the early second half of the 20th century to the present day. His work is distinguished by a silence characteristic of a minimalist attitude with very unique tones. The main reference point is one of his sculptures installed in the city of Caldas da Rainha. A meditative journey will be presented with seven possible itineraries, demonstrating a unique poetics anchored in the transition from the obviousness of the materials to the latent nature of the sculpture, rooted in a deep knowledge of the origins and nature of sculptural work. Paying special attention to issues of surface and plasticity of materials, space is assessed as an active determinant of sculpture and a working process characterized by successive stages of decanting or cleaning that lead to formal and poetic refinement.
This study proposes a historiographical and curatorial itinerary of the work of Zulmiro de Carvalho, inscribing it within the processes of renewal of Portuguese sculpture from the last quarter of the 20th century to the present day. Starting from a reflection on the plurality of time and the dissolution of linear narratives in art, it analyzes the emergence of abstract and minimalist sculpture in Portugal, in conjunction with the international training of artists, almost always provided by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship program and, in the case of Zulmiro de Carvalho, stemming from his experience at St. Martin’s School of Art (London). The central axis of the study therefore develops from the author's critical and curatorial itinerary, which has followed the work of Zulmiro de Carvalho for more than two decades, in different exhibition and institutional contexts. The presence of his works in group exhibitions such as Porto 60/70: The Artists and the City, Studiolo XXI, From Home to a World, and also the most recent projects at the Gramaxo Foundation is mentioned. It is noted how the exhibition concept is responsible for reconfiguring the reading of his work in sculpture, drawing or photography in dialogue with different audiences. Zulmiro de Carvalho's work is characterized by geometric rigor, conscious exploration of materiality and a complicit relationship with space, whether interior or exterior. The affirmation of his work is a structuring reference for contemporary Portuguese sculpture, projecting itself among his peers and beyond borders.
The public space in the work of Zulmiro de Carvalho
This text aims to study, analyse and discuss the public work of Zulmiro de Carvalho, defining it as a series of pieces that are accessible, without restrictions, to the public, whether they are permanently or temporarily located in public or private spaces, outdoors or indoors, being free access and the presence of the work in the spaces where daily life flows the distinguishing features. The study of Zulmiro de Carvalho's public works therefore involves a twofold inquiry. On the one hand, analysing how the works are integrated into the public space. On the other hand, exploring how the public space is reflected in the works. While it is true that this dialectic is valid for all artistic productions that choose public space as their location, in the case of Zulmiro de Carvalho's public works, it is imperative to consider it, since the sculptor's work is eminently site-specific, insofar as it is from his vision and understanding of the place that the sculptor conceives his work. That is why we chose to analyse all of Zulmiro's public works, from civil public sculpture to sacred art, thus enabling us to ascertain the consistency and coherence of Zulmiro de Carvalho's art.
The origin of this Dossier dedicated to Zulmiro de Carvalho—one of the foremost figures of Portuguese sculpture—arises from a gesture that is simultaneously simple and profound: the public recognition of a body of work and the reunion of a community with one of its own. The inauguration of Pórtico do Rio, conceived by the sculptor for the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Clube Naval Infante D. Henrique, generated a wave of sharing on social media. Among the many comments that circulated, the one by Professor Mauricius Farina, editor of Revista Visuais, stood out. His praise of the sculptor became the starting point for a conversation that quickly evolved into an editorial project. My reply, suggesting the possibility of writing an article on the work in partnership with a colleague, immediately resonated with Mauricius Farina, who generously broadened the horizon by proposing that the text should become the nucleus of a Dossier, inviting us to open space for other authors. Thus, this journey began. I use the word journey deliberately. Since childhood, I have been connected to the Clube Naval Infante D. Henrique, first as an athlete and now as a board member—an institution of which Zulmiro de Carvalho is also a member, maintaining a relationship of affection with the Club that accompanies his own biography: he was born very close by, grew up by the river, and the invitation to create a sculpture dates back to 2008. Only now, however, were the conditions in place for the project to be realized, significantly coinciding with the Club’s centenary. The right time always finds its form. For everything there is a time, and this was the time to cast bread upon the waters. Cover image: Marta Strambi, The Rabbit’s Doubt, 2020, porcelain and iron.
Manifesto and digital intervention in the exhibition Corps à corps_Histoire(s) de la photographie (Paris), held at the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou (Beaubourg), from September/23 to March/24. Like a fable, a rhinoceros invades the exhibition, the poster, the museum environment as a form of protest against a curatorship with a Eurocentric vision in a private collection and in the museum’s own collection.
This essay investigates the structural affinities between light and sound to reflect on the ontology of the technical image, based on its approximation to music as suggested by Vilém Flusser. Drawing on the wave-like nature and tonal modulations of both phenomena, it proposes an understanding of photography as a performative and vibrational image, aiming to discuss its affective potential, which becomes more intense in the environment of screens and digital technologies.
This article reflects on the relationship between photography and flânerie, questioning whether the conditions artists encounter today in large cities are the same as those that allowed Charles Baudelaire, in 19th-century Paris, to embody the figure of the flâneur. It also takes flânerie as a reference to outline a series of exclusions imposed by the city regarding the right to walk and to gaze. The text analyzes recent photographic experiences in which the acts of walking and photographing follow strict instructions previously defined by the artists. We propose the hypothesis that these works are symptomatic of an environment increasingly hostile to the contemplative wandering of flânerie—whether due to the acceleration of movement or the lack of sufficient distance to take in the landscape. On one hand, the methodical and arbitrary nature of these experiments highlights the collapse of any possibility of romanticizing the city. On the other, it represents a possible effort to resist the inertial momentum imposed by this environment.
Roland Barthes is the author of one of the most influential and widely circulated books on photography, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, published posthumously in 1980. Since its release, this book has continued to generate diverse debates between those who regard Barthes as a fertile ground for critical inquiry and those who seek to challenge his theoretical propositions. While the most extensively discussed concept in the book is the establishment of a photographic noeme, the that-has-been, my interest lies in examining two other elements that permeate Barthes’s writing: mourning and Tyché. The experience of mourning, catalyzed by the death of his mother, serves as a key to understanding the author's meditations on photography and its relation to the real, framed through the lens of Tyché, driven by the desire to encounter his mother once more within the photographic image. This insistent image – which we, as readers, are never granted access to – remained physically present to Barthes, within sight and reach on his writing desk, and it underpins his project of rehabilitating the maternal figure: a poignant effort to keep her alive for himself.
This article proposes a reflection on the history of images as a narrative element, focusing on the concept of DISPLACEMENT as a key idea for understanding the transformation of the meaning and form of images over time. The main argument argues that images, including photographic images, showed a place or meaning beyond the images themselves. This is true until the moment when the visual renounces narration, and images, and words too, simply want to be equal to themselves. It is at this moment that the historical avant-garde movements are born, and it is at this moment that the story, the narration, both of words and images, is replaced by discourse, understood as an element that explains the meaning of images and words beyond their presence and materiality. Conceptual art epitomizes this paradigm shift, in which works of art become all words, all discourse, and the value of objects gives way to the value of the subject who looks. The art of making gives way to the art of seeing.
Das Unheimliche is part of a long trajectory of artistic and academic research that investigates the disappearance of the face in portraits and self-portraits, ratifying and exploring the concept of anti-portraits as an expression of contemporary identity fragmentation. The series, produced between 2013 and 2024, focuses on the burying and unearthing of fingerprints of photographic portraits taken of people who are part of the artist&#39;s network of relationships. These images, which pass through different countries over the course of ten years, deconstructing themselves and becoming traces of what they once were, symbolize and represent deconstructions and reconstructions of photographic elements, as much as they represent the emotional, relational and identity mutations that the set of subjects and relationships that define the series undergo over the course of these ten years. Referencing Freud, the title refers to the concept of unheimliche, reflecting on the destabilization of affections and places that were once safe. The work dematerializes the photographic and the reconstruction of relationships and identities through time and space, mixing personal and cultural experiences in a visual narrative that questions permanence, stability and migration.
This article presents some aspects of the photographic portraits taken by Alair Gomes (1921–1992) during his travels in Europe in the 1960s and 1980s. Inspired by the classical tradition of portraiture, the photographer captures young men in public spaces, creating images that intertwine art, desire, and everyday life. As a sensitive flâneur, Alair Gomes reveals an erotic gaze toward the male body. The frontal compositions and gestures of the models suggest collaboration and a certain complicity, making portraiture a space of intimacy, fabulation, and the aesthetic elaboration of affection.
A two-act performance by Sofia Borges, exploring the relationship between past, present and future through a dystopian approach. The project focuses on masks made from photographic portraits of sculptures from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, selected for their ability to “look” at the viewer. The performance inverts the traditional dynamic, making the past (represented by the masks) observe the audience, provoking reflections on memory, forgetting and the fluidity of history. The work questions the fixity of cultural meanings and the way museums dissociate objects from their original contexts. The performance transforms static sculptures into active entities, challenging notions of time and identity. The result includes photographs and films that are autonomous works, not just documentation. The collaboration with dancers and musicians reinforces the idea of ​​a past that resurfaces, interrogating the present.
Photography has never been merely a passive record of reality. It is a field of disputes, displacements, and reinventions, where history, art, politics, and affect intersect. The portfolios and articles published in this issue reveal how the photographic image transcends its materiality to become a critical device, capable of questioning hegemonic narratives, subverting traditions, and reconfiguring our relationship with time, memory, and space. In this issue, Antonio Anson invites us to reflect on displacement as a central axis for understanding the transformation of images. When visuality renounces linear narration, the avant-gardes emerge, replacing history with discourse — a gesture radicalized by conceptual art, converting the object into word, matter into idea. This movement does not eliminate the image but rather puts it under tension, demanding from the viewer an active stance, capable of deciphering layers of meaning beyond the visible. Thus, necessarily, an art of seeing displaces the gaze and the viewer’s axis, positioning them also as a site of concept. Wagner Souza e Silva reminds us that photography is, above all, vibration. By bringing light and sound closer together, he reveals its performative nature, especially in digital contexts, where images pulse on screens, resonating as affective compositions. This perspective prompts us to ask: isn’t photography also a score, a writing of frequencies and silences? In contrast to conceptual abstraction, Aline Gomes presents the work of Alair Gomes, whose erotic and collaborative portraits of young European men reinvent classical tradition. His flâneur gaze captures not just bodies, but desires and complicities, turning the street into a stage for a constructed intimacy. Here, photography becomes encounter — a game of seduction between the photographer and the photographed. Sofia Borges radicalizes this discussion by photographing photographs, destabilizing the notion of originality. Her work operates as a visual rhapsody, where fragments are recombined into new narratives, questioning the very history of art. By evoking “Sounds of Marble,” she confronts us with the inaudible — the silence of classical sculptures, now re-signified through the lens. In the same spirit of intervention, my “contribution” to the Corps à corps exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) proposes a digital rhinoceros as a protest against the Eurocentrism of museum collections. Here, the fable is a call for disobedience: art must invade, disturb, question the canons. Paula Cabral, in turn, buries photographs to explore Freud’s Unheimliche — the uncanniness of what was once familiar. Her “anti-portraits” are traces of decomposing identities and liquid affections, powerful metaphors for contemporary migrations and uprootings. Fábio Gátti revisits Barthes and his search for the lost mother in photography, reminding us that the image is also mourning and Týkhe (chance). The ça-a-été (“that-has-been”) is not just an index of the real, but a gesture of resistance against forgetting. Finally, Isis Gasparini and Ronaldo Entler interrogate flânerie in the 21st century: is it still possible to wander contemplatively in accelerated cities? They reveal a methodical effort to resist urban inertia, even when space no longer allows Baudelairean poetic drifting. In the end, they highlight the differentiation of the female gaze in the flânerie process as a matter of gender and feminist affirmation. If there is a thread linking all these works, it is photography as a political act — whether through displacement, vibration, protest, or mourning. Through intervention, it forces us to rethink not just what we see, but how we look. In a world saturated with images, perhaps its greatest power lies precisely in making us slow down, question, and, above all, feel.
The text deals with two pieces by composer Rodolfo Caesar, Dueto Je Ne and Steve Lá, built based on the procedure of North American composer Steve Reich of micro-phasing between audio tracks. Despite using the same technique, however, Caesar creates other meanings, either from the relationship of this procedure with the source materials, or, in the case of Steve Lá, by coupling visual images to the sound substrate. The meanings created with the material appropriated by the composer - the voice of the artist Joseph Beuys (in the case of Dueto Ja Ne) and images and music from the Broadway DVD (in the case of Steve Lá) will be analyzed. Finally, the link between Dueto Ja Ne and a drawing by visual artist Milton Machado will be highlighted, which has the character of a score, from whose reading came the idea of ​​appropriating Reich's procedure.
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The secundarization of content in the psychoanalytic analysis of the creative impulse
This article seeks to explore the notion of content secondaryization, highlighting the limitations of the psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics explored by Sigmund Freud when analyzing and understanding the artist's creative impulse. In this context, the Kleinian approach is recognized for its ability to explore this territory, linking the formal aspects that define it with the element of memory as both a practical and theoretical tool. In this way, a bridge is established between the two domains, allowing for an exploration focused on understanding the motives behind the creative impulse and independent of the specificities of the resulting content.
Martin Heidegger and Fernando Lanhas. The Black Forest and the Penedo da Serra de Valongo. Based on Heidegger's phenomenological thinking related to poetic making and the concept of dwelling, which in turn presupposes a glimpse of the essence of being in contact with the world through poetic making, this essay focuses on the work of the portuguese artist Fernando Lanhas, who establishes his research in an essential dialogue between his body and the natural materials of the world, that which surrounds him. Common to both of them is the need to understand themselves in an essential sense through poetry, but also the fact that they have sought out places in nature to do so.
This article explores relevant aspects of the theoretical work of artist Rodolfo Caesar, focusing on a reinvention of listening. We delve into Caesar's reflections on sound imagery, loops, the relationship between listening and the night, as well as the notion of copying in the realm of sound. Subsequently, we draw parallels between the theoretical work of the sound artist and the work of Cildo Meireles, a visual artist who employs sound as a medium of creation. Finally, we observe how the poetic nature of Rodolfo Caesar's theoretical thought enables a deepened perception and analysis of works situated in the field of visualities.
Kohai, senpai, and listening as a method
The terms senpai and kohai refer to a mode of relationship among students where the more experienced, the senpai, serves as a reference for the less experienced, the kohai. This text, written from the perspective of a kohai, seeks to briefly present some aspects of composer Rodolfo Caesar’s work, whether in the realm of musical creation or in his navigation through the winding paths of academic life, highlighting the uniqueness of his contributions in both fields. Rooted in an education strongly influenced by experimentation in Brazil and France, Caesar’s thought on listening, expressed in works and writings over more than four decades, stands out for its originality and elegance.
A conversation [and a listening] with Rodolfo Caesar
The text outlines a conversation with Rodolfo Caesar, exploring various topics related to his artistic and academic work as a composer and researcher throughout his life. Key themes include materiality, technological subjectivation, medium, animals, and the concept of sound. However, in the conversation, the act of listening and its multiple discoveries became the primary focus for both interlocutors. Rodolfo Caesar, known for his highly creative output in the field of listening arts (music and sound arts), has also made significant contributions by integrating artistic practice with scientific research. His works provide a critical perspective combined with a poetic interpretation of the field of music, showcasing his admirable insight.
Kantian considerations on representation, aesthetics, the beautiful, and the sublime
Kant (1724-1804) introduced the term aesthetics in the Critique of Pure Reason, referring to the pure forms of a priori sensible intuition: space and time. These forms, part of the transcendental dimension, condition the reception of sensible intuitions, internally organized by time and externally by space. For Kant, time subordinates all objects as phenomena of sensibility. He conceived the term “transcendental aesthetics” to describe the pre-existing structure that allows for the reception of sensible intuitions, differing from the critique of taste. Kant states that knowledge requires sensitivity (reception of representations) and understanding (formation of concepts applied to these intuitions). However, despite the centrality of the notion of representation, he did not provide a complete definition, using it in parts of the Transcendental Logic and Transcendental Aesthetics. This study analyzes the conditions of its formulation and dissemination in Kantian critiques. In the aesthetic judgment, Kant explores why it does not produce knowledge, making its objective universalization impossible. Declaring something as beautiful seeks its universality, but others' disagreement can generate frustration, highlighting the subjectivity of aesthetic taste. The second part addresses the Analytic of the Beautiful and the Analytic of the Sublime, highlighting the ruptures and innovations brought by the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The beautiful is analyzed in relation to pleasure and pain, and the roles of determinative and reflective judgments in the aesthetics of the beautiful. The aesthetics of the sublime, encompassing its mathematical and dynamic forms, are explored in their connections with nature, morality, and the formless.
Worlds in collapse & contemporary vanities
The text reflects on a series of watercolors – Primavera Negra – created between 2020 and 2022. At the same time, it highlights the connection of this work within the broader context of contemporary artists who address the theme of life's fragility and ephemerality; establishing complex relationships of continuity and rupture with the pictorial genre of Vanitas from the 17th century and Memento Mori from classical antiquity. Part of the reflection on the watercolors draws on Martin Heidegger's contributions, understanding that, in forming relationships, man “builds worlds,” and these fragile worlds carry their share of poetry and tragedy.
Visual reading of Introduction to the Stone by Rodolfo Caesar
This work presents a visual analysis of Rodolfo Caesar's composition Introdução à Pedra using the Acousmograph software. The Acousmograph operates as a graph that transcribes time, durations, and frequencies. The analysis is inherently personal, as the visual images generated do not directly translate the sound images, but aim to represent a subjective listening experience of the piece. The resulting interpretation is not an abstract graph, but is rich with sonic and non-sonic references, which I sought to translate into forms and colors evoking objects, elements, and emotions. I propose that this approach constitutes a valid method of musical analysis, relying on the intermodality between sound and image.
Mebs/Caraxia (1970–1971) is a 33-rpm vinyl record, limited to 500 copies and produced by the author. The concept of this record, recorded using a frequency oscillator, was to create sound sculptures—that is, to project a spatial image through auditory perception. On one side of the vinyl, the band MEBS represents the sound graph of the Möbius strip, while the other side, CARAXIA, refers to making a spiral audible. In 1981, Rodolfo Caesar and Tim (Luiz Augusto) Rescala performed an excerpt of Caraxia at the Sidney Miller Hall, Funarte, in Rio de Janeiro.