Paulo Nozolino: Loaded Shine

Taken between 2008 and 2013 in New York, Lisbon, Paris and Berlin as well as in the French and Portuguese countryside, these photographs by Paulo Nozolino bear his usual dark symbolic syntax. Still using 35mm film and occasionally a flash, this tight sequence of vertical pictures shows us, once again, his everlasting concern for the state of the world and his quest for the pure, true, non-manipulated analogue image.

Paulo Nozolino: Loaded Shine is a bright obscure piece. The transparency of the black shows a world that is continually destroying itself. Closer to the certitude of an end. The decadence of the place. Life by a thread, leaving traces of light. This is where we came to. This is where we are. All we have left is putrefaction, garbage, claustral confinement, a quiet decay that embraces slow death. So slow that we still may believe it might never come.

We see her, we feel her, we touch her with our own hands. Yet. We are responsible for the disease but we don't know how to escape from it. We were hungry and we ate. We are dreaming about the crumbs that we left behind. Unwise. Eyes on the floor, there is no redeeming act. Prisoners of a dirty and corrupted matter. Emptiness. Full of guilt inhabited by a depressing seediness, by careless negligence, by lazy weakness, by the violence of the spirit. Home is a forgotten word. And so are many others.

Alexandra Carita