carlos pataca

Carlos Pataca is a Portuguese architect, urban planner and teacher who currently resides between São Paulo and Amsterdam. In recent years he has devoted a large part of his free time to exploring contemporary photography which he uses as a medium to translate his daily thoughts about images. His interest in photography covers a broad range and many different subjects: from “photographisme” to pictorial images, from poetic registration to graphic systems, from urban architecture to nature, and from conceptual abstractions to descriptive images. He refuses to concentrate or focus on a single theme and as such continually wanders between the lines looking for what is there but not visible, for what he can perhaps guess but cannot explain, and for what is particular or peculiar but at the same time universal. He attempts to use photography as an instrument to build a bridge between his inside world and the world outside. Although his visual vocabulary comes from architecture, his interests cover all of the visual arts and he experiments with combining these influences on images looking to capture the contradictions of the contemporary moment. His work is typically produced as a series of concepts. These series are like mental bookshelves used to store and organise his thoughts about his personal obsessions. Here you will find a few examples of his attempts to record his feelings using photography as a support that allows him to be more plural and less singular.