In Chemical Imaginations - Landscapes of the End, Dirceu Maués uses the chemigram technique to create imaginary landscapes with the light that burns the film or darkens the paper. The latter is a way of drawing or painting with chemicals on silver-coated light-sensitive paper, which is capable of evoking powerful shadows and the deepest obscurity.
More than the simple trace of a horizon line, it is the very materiality that the image acquires during the creative process that gives rise to the illusion that we are observing a landscape. Stains and textures are created as the silver particles are respectively revealed and removed by the chemicals in the developer and fixer. It is a process in which the poetic power of chance is always present.
The resulting landscape is a place of deep shadows and charged atmospheres - landscapes of the end of a modern world in which chemical-based photography is one of its paradigms. In this work, the image is never completely revealed, since any image, even the most precise, always contains a mist that covers certainty.
Dirceu Maués (b. 1968, Brazil) is in residence as part of the "Ithaque x Cité internationale des arts" programme, in partnership with FotoRio.