“The ladies of Avignon” (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso was one of the paintings that signposted the emergence of cubism in 1907. Painting and photography, unlike sculpture, represent depth and volume through visual means.
One of the characteristics of Cubism is the fragmentation of figures and their representation through geometric shapes. Imagine that you are at an intersection of several avenues and cannot simultaneously look at all sides. The cubist artist fragments all these sides and throws the pieces into the image.
Gustavo Minas uses this same strategy in contemporary photographic production. He creates a cubist photograph through the overlapping of people, landscapes and objects. The photograph has several simultaneous viewpoints and it allows to perceive the convergence of fragments in the visual result .
We observe the scenes through slight distortions. These folds are the spaces between the characters, the objects and the landscape that appear as reflections, shadows and contrasts.
Cubism in Gustavo Minas’ photography approaches cinema as the sequence of moving images. In his case, we watch the film in the same image, and our eyes are the guides in the succession of scenes.
