FROM THE HOME
A casa foi vendida com todas as lembranças todos os móveis todos os pesadelos todos os pecados cometidos ou em vias de cometer a casa foi vendida com seu bater de portas com seu vento encanado sua vista do mundo seus imponderáveis [...]
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
The home was meticulously decomposed into its many elements: wardrobe, line closet, appliances cupboard, display cabinet, shelves, china closet, silverware drawer, jewelry box, paraphernalia trunk, drawers, boxes, reliquaries, vases on the windowsill, a fishbowl containing dim waters in which colorful little fish swim about silently, a lighted fireplace, and even a partial view of the kitchen glimpsed from the front door, or the large volumes set against the back wall of the garage... All these and many other things make up a home, a complex organism as the photos by Andreas Thein clearly reveal. A home is a double of the human body, a stretched skin that covers us (its dwellers) and our devices - an endless roster of objects, appliances and ornaments with which we surround ourselves, possibly to mitigate the dense bulk of human solitude. Notwithstanding the homespun banality of the photographers subjects, the images cut out from their environment are quite intriguing. To begin, there is a remarkable coincidence between their shapes and the formats of objects and angles of vision they represent, and then they are totally devoid of human presence.
Where have all the dwellers of this home gone? Where are the people who make use of these objects and magnetize them with their attendance and their prosaic everyday activities?
The photographer gives viewers no clue, although everything he reveals - the fire in the hearth, the refrigerator replete with food products, the dirty clothes piled up in the hamper, the unequivocally antique and richly hand wrought silverware, and the empty drawer in which a paper clip and a small twisted rubber band were left behind - are indicators of sequestered presences or, to put it in other words, brief absences. Who knows, the dwellers and their talks, their busy to and fro movement, their desires and resentments, and their rites prescribed by the household order might come back just in time to prevent dust from spreading all over things, and things from rotting away and dying. Other elements intrinsic to ordinary households will come in tow: plenty of cross ventilation, slamming doors, creaking wood sounds, the twilight shadows formed just before everything plunges momentarily in darkness, before lights are turned on here and there. If photography in fact operates cross-sections in time and space - in the first case, by generating a clot that blocks off its gushing flow, and in the second instance, while producing a frame that shows how much things overflow on all sides -, the photographs by Andreas Thein yield a singular upshot by replicating the formats of photo subjects and at the same time removing them so emphatically from their original set. These life-size photos posted against the ideal white backdrop of gallery walls address the objects and environments they represent, as well as the spectator. Their unusual rendition imparts physicality on them; Thein's pictures seemingly convey something more than just visual representations. Given their nearly-object status, these images take after the nature of objects and end up longing for us the spectators, needing our presence so they can fulfill their mission as utensils or repositories of memories and desires worth being recollected. In turn, we stand disquietly near these objects that ultimately exist only in the context of appearances - yet we can no longer make out what they are for sure.
Agnaldo Farias, Sao Paulo/Brasil
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