Bruno Guerreiro: Melancholy Vice – As photography is pure contingency and cannot be more than that, objectively, I say: this is a work about “Love” and the Labyrinthine Man

He who is lost is lost, and he who is alive is dead! It is common to go out at night in search of spirits, so much so that sometimes it feels like you are searching for another body. But it is also later, in the silence of the night, that the spirit evolves and includes itself.

The Labyrinthine Man then emerges, sweet and divergent, seething in an incessant search for harmony, and ends up escaping into disconcerting imagery. It is this deconstructed gaze, incited by a serene yet inquiring melancholy, where images reveal the totality of atmospheres, that hides the secret of slow and deliberate observation.

There is something in these images that resonates with a soft, chilling cry—a liberating cry, open to embracing the tangible textures of surfaces, but also the inhospitality and unknown possibilities of what could be. There is also the transfiguration of simple forms, their consecration making evident the hidden, sublime simplicity of things, transposed into multiple planes where various realities are created, contrasting and interacting simultaneously.

This leads us to recognize that behind these optical ambivalences, retained on an innocent and somewhat disturbed plane, there is a clarity achieved through accepting the immutability of realities as an irreducible fact in the life of each subject—something that must be patiently observed. It is a gray, but not entirely atrocious, reality, one that must be contemplated by adapting our conceptual filters to various prisms, positions, perspectives, and accepting its obligatory share of sadness, bitterness, apathy, monotony, and deep entanglement in the dubious dirt path that continues into the heart of the night.

Bruno Guerreiro is a Portuguese photographer who has been exploring analog processes since 2021, after 12 years in the digital world. He studied at the Portuguese Institute of Photography from 2007 to 2010.

“Photography is the air I breathe.”