Saltwater

Raphael Moreira Gonçalves
January 13  —  February 10, 2017
Pasio

During the last January, French artist Raphael Moreira Goncalves held an interesting show called “Salt Water” in the pasio of Mohsen Gallery. In the show, he utilized an innovative method to create his art. Using “Augment” software, a 120 x 84 cm image would turn into a sculpture in the virtual space.
In fact, based on the image, the viewers would see a form that was obviously disorderly, it could also appear in different angles. Besides the form that would show up, the way the artist chose to present his work was an essential part of the show. It seems that by insisting on seeing the image in the virtual space, he intends to widen the realm of reality. Moreira uses whatever he deems necessary to create his work, and in the meantime, modern and even unconventional tools interest him. His work is like innumerable, unbalanced pieces from reality.
He uses anything peripheral as a screen: a monitor, a body, a broken mirror, the water surface, or anything that can work as a screen for his images. He shows his image in space that seem void and paradoxical, as if he is in a superior position. He is fascinated by forming reality that exist between the tangible and the virtual space. There is a powerful force flowing in his works. For him, the perfection we would want to achieve is building something up and then breaking it down. Moreira makes use of a combination of textures, colors, and rhythms to structuralize his work. He insists on reconstructing at least one part of our vantage point to scramble and reorganize the visual space. He tries to use chaos to mess up the mental and physical layers of our perception, only to reconstruct it once again. His virtual sculpture leaves a new perception of from and volume is only visible on virtual space, makes the viewer think that another world is living its different life somewhere in the neighborhood of the world we know.

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