-
-
Photographic Drawings
The Photographic Drawings series emerges from the observation of minute surfaces, where freshly deposited drops of ink become the starting point for sensitive landscapes. Echoing the Japanese practice of shodō (calligraphic gesture), each stroke is immediate, singular, and carries the fullness of the present moment.
These images activate a three-dimensional perception and transform the photographic plane into a space of presence. Between color, light, and shadow, organic and symbolic forms arise — evoking marine, celestial, or inner topographies. These are not landscapes to be seen, but rather felt.
A central element in these compositions is the space around the gesture — the negative space, the silence between forms. Rooted in Zen thought, where emptiness is not absence but potential, this void becomes a field of resonance. It is within this openness that the form finds its meaning, and where the viewer is invited to breathe and inhabit the image.
Photographic Drawings proposes a decelerated sense of time, where each work reveals the instant just before its disappearance — not as a loss, but as an offering. The space between things is not empty, but full of possibility.
-
Mineral
Mineral begins with pigment in its most elemental state. Before becoming paint, image or surface, color appears as loose matter, unstable and on the verge of dispersal.These pigments are arranged into chromatic compositions of strong material presence. The logic underlying these formations resonates with the tradition of Buddhist mandalas, where the careful construction of form coexists with the awareness of its impermanence.Each composition exists only for a brief interval. Once assembled, the material inevitably returns to dispersion, and the drawing disappears to make way for another configuration.Photography becomes the place where this instant remains. Not as the fixation of form, but as the memory of a gesture that acknowledges the transience of matter and time. -
Quadra
In Quadra, Daniel Mattar collects printed fragments from his daily life — discarded color charts, packaging, and mundane surfaces — remnants of the industrial and graphic language that quietly shape our visual environment. These materials, often overlooked or destined for the trash, are reclaimed and given new significance. Through this act of poetic recycling, what was once banal becomes a ground for transformation.
Upon these rational, coded surfaces — structured by grids, lines, and typographic logic — Mattar applies sculptural volumes of oil paint in intuitive gestures. The title Quadra (Portuguese for “block” or “quadrant”) refers to the geometry of the substrate, but also to its disruption: paint floods the system, destabilizing its order and introducing vitality, unpredictability, and material excess.
Once photographed in high detail, these painted surfaces transcend their origin. The macro lens reveals what the eye cannot grasp: chromatic landscapes that resemble oceans in motion, tectonic shifts, or abstract topographies. Through light and shadow, the photographic process suspends the gesture in a state of heightened presence.
Quadra is a negotiation between structure and eruption, between design and matter. It evokes not only a formal exploration of color and texture, but also a gesture of reparation — an ecological and symbolic gesture that reclaims and transforms the overlooked surfaces of contemporary life into sites of energy, imagination, and resistance.
-
Rise
2018 -2022Rise draws from newspaper and magazine articles addressing the ongoing transformations of the global climate. These pages, originally intended for the circulation of information, become the ground for a visual inquiry into how the urgency of these events is perceived.Layers of paint traverse the printed surface, bringing image and language into close proximity. Fragments of words remain visible beneath the chromatic matter, creating a tension between reading and material presence.The density of the paint and the intensity of color shift the gaze toward the surface of the news itself, allowing information, gesture and matter to coexist within the same field. In the photographic image, this friction between word and color transforms the journalistic record into a visual experience, inviting the viewer to remain with a reality whose scale often exceeds immediate perception. -
Simulacro
2011-2012Amid vending machines, illuminated shop windows and packaged goods, Simulacro portrays a landscape where immediate gratification reshapes the ways relationships are experienced.The series emerges from long-term research into Japanese culture, initiated during a period living in Tokyo in 1999. Years later, returning to the country in 2011, the work observes a context marked by increasing urban solitude and a highly developed economy of individual consumption.Within this same ecosystem appear hyper-realistic silicone dolls, female figures conceived as substitute companions and designed to offer a presence without alterity. Like the products available in vending machines, these bodies present themselves as objects accessible on demand, embedded in a logic of solitary consumption that intensifies the objectification of women.Photographed through the visual language of portraiture, with dark backgrounds, controlled lighting and frontal compositions, these figures generate a tension between realism and simulation. Seen today, the series reveals an almost premonitory dimension, anticipating a contemporary scenario in which technologies and simulacra increasingly occupy the space of human relationships. -
Silent Regiment
2013-2015Developed during a journey through Mongolia, this series of portraits reflects on the ways images carry traces of time, history and ritual.The photographed soldiers appear suspended between individuality and collective identity. Their presence evokes the long historical continuum of military structures that have shaped territories and political imaginaries across centuries. Yet the images avoid heroic representation. The figures emerge instead in a state of quiet stillness, where the body becomes a surface upon which historical memory quietly accumulates.Each photograph is printed on canvas and subsequently subjected to material interventions. In some works a single brushstroke crosses the image in a brief and decisive gesture. In others the surface is immersed in baths of tea, allowing oxidation and staining to gradually alter the photographic field.Tea introduces a temporal dimension to the image. As a substance associated with ritual and daily practice across vast regions of Asia, it operates here not merely as pigment but as a material agent of time. The stains produced through this process evoke aging, erosion and the slow sedimentation of memory within the photographic surface.Rather than stabilizing the portrait, these interventions destabilize the image, opening a space where representation, gesture and material transformation intersect. The resulting works exist somewhere between photograph, painting and artifact, suggesting that the image is not fixed but continuously shaped by processes of time and matter. -
Cirúrgicos
2014Cirúrgicos presents an inventory of instruments used in medical and surgical procedures, objects designed to intervene directly on the human body. Isolated against dark backgrounds, these tools acquire an almost sculptural presence, revealing the precision and coldness of the technical gesture.The series expands when portraits undergo processes of fusion between different individuals. Real faces become composite identities, figures that belong to no possible biography. These hybrid presences inhabit an ambiguous territory between recognition and estrangement.Produced in 2013, the work anticipates a debate that has since intensified in contemporary culture: the growing transformation of appearance into a project. Between intervention, construction and the desire for correction, Cirúrgicos observes the moment when the body begins to be treated as a surface for editing.
-
