Fernando Rosa

Landscape photography is increasingly a challenge for those who practice it. A landscape, in contemporary photography, is the expression of a certain state of the spirit of the person who captures it. On this occasion, Fernando Rosa has released his spiritual and aesthetic restlessness in the landscape of Rapa Nui. We do not see in these magnificent images a habitual, everyday portrait, much less tantalizingly picturesque of the island. What we notice is the contemplation of a landscape that speaks to us from its integrity, from its fullness and completeness. Undoubtedly this is favored by the panoramic format, but it is another antecedent that with greater vehemence widens its artistic scope. In the first place, nature appears in whites and blacks, which depersonifies its anecdotes and elevates it to a plane that is more evocatively homogeneous and at the same time universal. On the other hand, the presence of the man who inhabits it does not figure in an obvious way, but it is overlapping. We know that men lived, live and will live there, but their existences leave traces here more subtle, more intuitive than concrete. And at this point, it is worth mentioning the appearance of the ritual and mythological icon of the island, such as the moai. The strong visual presence of the stone effigy, unique and monumental, becomes an element of that particular environment. Like a rock, a hill, a tree, a cloud, the moai is embedded in the territory's own memory. He stops being a protagonist, he manages to shake off the back of the tourist stigma and exclaims his geographical right behaving, in the frames, as one more detail. A new landscape of silent, silent and testimonial beauty emerges, where each fragment and each accident belong to a much more immeasurable, more sublime, perhaps improbable, perhaps unthinkable whole. Because everything is framed in a landscape, everything is born and dies in a landscape, the sample here is an intimate radiography of the author, his great sensitivity to nature and his unique photographic vision. It will then fall on the viewer, the revelation of its mysteries and intransigences.

 

Daniela Rosenfeld