10 QUESTIONS WITH ANA PINHO VARGAS
5 September, 2024
On the website www.altiba9.com, an interview was published about my work, where I share my journey and experience with photography, how I relate music with the photographic image and create “times, rhythms and harmonies” from images. And a few other things!
Ana Pinho Vargas is a Portuguese artist, photographer, and painter based in Vila Nova de Gaia, Porto.
She has a Master degree in Photography from the School of Arts of Portuguese Catholic University in Porto in 2022 and a Bachelor degree in Photography and Visual Culture from the Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication in IADE European University in Lisbon in 2019. Ana studied music from a young age, starting with violin and then the piano and harpsichord.
Her main exhibitions include Silêncio, part of X'18, a collective exhibition in Mute Gallery in Lisbon in 2018, and O diário, part of the Panorama21, a collective exhibition in the School of Arts of Portuguese Catholic University in Porto in 2021.
Her artistic practice involves music, photography, and abstraction. She thinks about the image musically, trying to create times, rhythms, and harmonies from it. The search for different melodic forms acts as a means of abstract self-representation, where she records her own reality.
Silêncio II | Project Statement
Silêncio II is the result of the junction of two coexisting universes: writing in musical scores and the artist in his most fragile physical humanity, revealing the intimacy of the eye through the close connection between the author and the person being photographed. A nostalgic look emerges from the shapes and textures of the sheets of music paper, reconstructing reflections of memories. The records of different elements of the body suggest the identity of the author's parents, both musicians and interpreters, becoming vulnerable through their gaze.
As her father said, "each new work is an open space" and this series is a mirror of that, that side of continuity and openness. Ana would like these images to convey a sensitivity, a moment of delicacy, a pure feeling and an invisible poetry. All the photographs were taken between 2018 and 2020.
The image tells something about the author's personal sensitivity and subjective outlook, with the intuition that the photographic image can be understood not necessarily as a realistic record but also and, essentially, as an interpretation. Therefore, it is a deconstruction of the mere representation of reality, where the search for "silêncio" (silence) is constant.
