Albano da Silva Pereira (Coimbra, 1950) has developed an unorthodox career in the field of photography. The public presence of his work began in 1980, with a set of images about the Island of Mozambique and would always develop in parallel with the other activity that has occupied him, the direction of the Coimbra's Photography Encounters (and, later, of the Visual Arts Center) started in 1981. Perhaps this second field of activity has obtained more visibility than artistic work, but the creation and production of images is the center of its world - which also includes the obsession with collecting artifacts, stones, cacti and images.

To make an archeology of his creative work, we would have to go back to the beginning of his photographic activity, during the Colonial War, when he was in Africa for the first time, the matrix to which he returns permanently. Then it is necessary to understand the connection to the cinema, having been an assistant and photographer to António Pedro Vasconcelos and Manoel de Oliveira — and the cinema is his way of seeing.

Thirdly, it is necessary to mention the connection with Robert Frank whom he met in the eighties and whom he brought to Portugal for the first time for an exhibition integrated into the 1986 Photography Encounters.

The exhibition that the Círculo de Artes Plásticas presents simultaneously at the Sereia facilities and on Rua Castro Matoso is the first retrospective of the work of Albano Silva Pereira. With travel photography as its guiding axis (which is one of the main vectors of photography in the 20th century) it begins with a recent work, Atlas (2011), a map of maps that establishes a personal and symbolic journey, to go back to the images of Ilha de Moçambique, to focus on images from north Africa, namely the series Maison Bérbère (1996), bringing together this set of images for the first time. Castro Matoso Street hosts his most recent works, his explorations of the deserts (Sahara, Atacama, Mojave), which are finally the image of his search for the paradox of the eruption of beauty in the most extreme conditions of survival — and thus his connection to the Dogon's people, a permanent source of return to Niger.

The desert is also a search for precedence, for what comes before: first of all, before life, the rock, the meteorite, the ground and the sky. His version of the landscape, present in the images split by the horizon line that almost transforms them into diptychs, or in paintings like praedella, are the result of this search that remains here, if not completely and thoroughly documented, at least marked: images of a world that no longer exists, or that is in extinction. Perhaps his cinematographic vision and the search for an ethic of the image over the most elementary (desire, dignity, dryness, survival), establish a link between the various moments of this 30-year journey that is now being presented.

Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra
2012