Artist

Tito Mouraz

Fluvial is a meditation on the beaches and villages of inland northern and central Portugal.

Photographed between 2011 and 2018, these fluvial scenes transmute personal geography into a fictional atmosphere. Testifying to the author’s lifelong relationship with northern and central Portuguese riverside beaches and villages, they act not in the manner of a topographic survey, but rather by equating erosion with vision. Just as the river currents have shaped the natural elements, time’s passage appears to have freed his gaze from irony, predisposing it to form and analogy, and to kindness towards his equals.

Capturing families at informal moments within Portuguese society, predominantly emigrant workers home from northern Europe for the summer, bodies, tree trunks and riverbed rocks are made to resemble small sculptures (some of which are anthropomorphic). The human body, here almost amphibious, is often reduced to a simple form, to the submerged surface, either adopting the stream bed as an optical instrument, or by shaping it with light.

The human and non-human bodies emerge from chiaroscuro schemes, either as elements of an illusory mise-en-scène, or defamiliarized, reduced to mere form, as if under a spell. Realistic yet dreamlike, conveying a pagan sense of nature, creating the atmospheric effect of an infinite Sunday, it reminds one of a summer dream – a visual ode to human relaxation.