Everyone agrees that photographs are silent by nature. Those that speak and sing are the photographs of cinema, thanks to the magnetic band on the film. A photograph is projected onto paper, as a film is projected onto canvas. In this process, the image is fixed a second time, one could say that it is definitively consigned to silence. And yet, we sometimes speak of a “piercing” or even a “screaming” image, in an imagined sense. The photographs of Catarina Osório de Castro are not only mute, but they are also silent — without wanting to fall into tautology. This is to underline the discretion in the work of the artist, who titled her first series of photographs in 2012, like a program to come: SILÊNCIO.
Her discretion does not prevent her from trans-gressing the proper rules of photography. The “mistakes” she deliberately commits while shooting were already present in SILÊNCIO where, for example, a rope runs right in front of the face of a man standing, covering his naked body with a beach towel and rendering his face invisible. In the DEVAGAR series, the artist records lights that do not illuminate everything, leaving the contents of a basket (fruits? vegetables? objects?) in shadow. In her new series PÓ DE ESTRELAS, the framing is tighter than ever. She cuts into the face. One woman’s face, painted in silver makeup, is cropped at the very edge of the lower lip — sensual, painted — and the focus falls only on the tip of the nose. This extreme cropping was already foreshadowed in the ECLIPSE series, with the head of a white horse reduced to just muzzle and neck.
In the first part ADN of his final video SCÉNARIO, completed just days before his death, Jean-Luc Godard shows in still image the head-on view of a hoofed animal. One might think it a white horse. With his old, raspy voice, the filmmaker speaks off-screen: “Take a white horse, to illustrate the fact that horses are not horses… the universe is a finger, everything is a horse.” At the end of the second part, in IMR, Godard returns to his Taoist-inspired formula, sitting in pajamas on the edge of a bed: “Take fingers, to illustrate the fact that fingers are not fingers… take non-horses to illustrate the fact that horses are not horses.” His final public word follows: “OK.” Yet the animal shown in the ADN video is not a horse, but a donkey! Just hours before voluntarily leaving this world, the filmmaker, through Jean-Paul Sartre, referred back to the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi, whose work the sinologist Jean-François Billeterdescribes as “polyphonic … [where] reflection comes along with it [polyphony].” [1]
Catarina Osório de Castro develops a Taoist [2] approach to the world. Perhaps her interest in greenhouses and other “gardens of acclimatization” stems from the thought of Zhuangzi. [3] With her new series PÓ DE ESTRELAS, the artist takes us into botanical gardens — from Lisbon to Paris, to Glasgow and beyond. In one greenhouse already in decay, Cleistocactus winteri spill from hanging baskets, like endless, colorless lemur tails. In the same image, a branch of Euphorbia polyacantha, native to Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia, extends outwards, trailing along a glass barrier like a handrail that has lost its grip. A macro shot shows the tip of a “hairy” cactus, likely an Espostoa melanostele, its extremities forming a halo of sanctity, its prickly stems traced in orange through the fuzzy cloud. In another image, we see a fragmented plant — or rather part of its trunk, as thick as an aged bamboo, entwined with a few leaves.
The ever-present humidity, perceptible also in two shots of fern leaves (probably Woodwardia or Cibotium), suggests hidden processes of rot. Another greenhouse, photographed lengthwise with its rounded end, dominates two-thirds of the image. The foreground shows a moss landscape, its green fading into straw-yellow. Stems with monochrome flowers seem to wither from lack of water. In the same greenhouse, this time photographed from the side and slightly askew, the artist observes a man seen from behind, contemplating the moss landscape. One might suspect him of being an intruder, so much do the other figures in Catarina Osório de Castro’s photographs seem complicit with the photographer.
Is a greenhouse in a botanical garden the abolition of space — even of time? [4] If the West saw its first greenhouse at the dawn of the Christian era, after the Egyptians and especially after the Chinese, the inventors, it was thanks to Roman Emperor Tiberius, who wanted cucumbers in the middle of winter. The 16th century witnessed a flourishing of botanical gardens across Europe. But the greenhouses as we know them today are mainly an inheritance of industrial colonialism. Here grew plants from the colonies. The largest greenhouse of the British Empire outside the island was built in 1784 in Calcutta. There, they cultivated tea and opium — not at all local — to test their resilience in new climates. Since the roots took hold, the English launched opium production in Bengal, occupied since 1690, and in 1839 began the First Opium War against China.
In Taoism, even death must be understood as a natural movement of the Dao, one of its countless transformations. Thus, Zhuangzi was said to have sung joyfully during his mourning period, after the death of his wife. From the Dao’s perspective, everything is ceaseless transformation. The quest for immortality, a central Taoist theme, probably stems from very ancient beliefs, for in the Zhuangzi, the most important figures among the Immortals are the Yellow Emperor and the Queen Mother of the West — a key reference for our artist. She is known for her “golden energy,” a color that reappears on three female faces in PÓ DE ESTRELAS.
As a photographer, Catarina Osório de Castro undertakes one of the most paradoxical tasks: 5 to reveal the essence of things and of people. To make visible the aspects we hide, those that slip from our perception. She pays close attention to surfaces and to the lights they reflect. She lavishes extreme care on execution, so that we are tempted to caress these surfaces: here, a milky sea with a small ripple; there, an eyelid aged over decades, nearly transparent. In earlier series she often directed her sensitivity toward stone and rock surfaces.
This profound fascination with stones and the temporal dimensions they imply—catapulting us hundreds of millions of years back in time—is something she shares with the artist Uriel Orlow. On the same date, and in parallel in the gallery’s mezzanine, he presents his video WE HAVE ALREADY LIVED THROUGH OUR FUTURE—WE JUST DON’T REMEMBER IT, accompanied by his FOREST MANIFESTO.
For PÓ DE ESTRELAS she includes only one — but what a stone! A stone profoundly black. The expanse of its surface suggests a large rock. A rock that, in one of its hollows, collects rainwater, scattered with tiny white specks — minerals? Impossible to determine the materiality of the glittering dots, but the visual effect is unmistakable: we see a starry sky reflected in the water contained by the rock. As though reversing the direction of our gaze. We lean downward, and perceive the stars of a clear sky free of clouds. A Taoist dust?
The title PÓ DE ESTRELAS refers to a discovery made by astrophysicists in 1957, signed B2FH, after Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle. Eric Lagadec, astronomer at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, explains: In the article “Synthesis of Elements in Stars”, the four authors state that … the Big Bang primarily produced hydrogen and helium. Most of the other atoms were formed in stars, which release them when they die. These new atoms are then injected into the interstellar medium and serve to form new stars. It turns out that our bodies, and those of all living beings, are made of these very same atoms! We can therefore say that we are stardust.
Joerg Bader
Geneva, September 2025
[1] Jean-François Billeter, Leçons sur le Tchouang-Tseu, p. 126, Allia, Paris 2023
[2] “The Dao is a mysterious thing about which it is almost impossible to speak. […] The Dao cannot be heard:
what can be heard is not it. The Dao cannot be seen: what can be seen is not it. The Dao cannot be spoken: what can be spoken is not it. That which gives form to forms is without form. The Dao has no name.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 22, pp. 182-186, trans. Jean Levi, Les œuvres de Maître Tchouang, Les éditions de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances, Paris, 2010).
[3] It is a relation to the world unfixed by any certainty — not even that of reality itself, as shown by the famous dream of Zhuangzi, who once awoke after dreaming he was a butterfly, and after reflection no longer knew whether it was he who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or the butterfly who had dreamed of being Zhuangzi, and had just awoken. https://www.imaginairedelachine.fr/2020/06/zhuangzi-365-285-av.j.c.html
[4] “To attune oneself to the Dao demands perceiving things no longer as fixed or bounded, but as a flow that carries every being and everything through ceaseless transformation, abolishing the limits of time and space.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 13, p. 113, trans. Jean Levi, The Works of Master Zhuang, Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances, Paris, 2010).
[5] “Forms and colors are apprehended through sight; sounds and words are apprehended through hearing. Alas, all my contemporaries remain convinced that forms and colors, sounds and words are enough to account for external reality. But how could they? That is why he who knows does not speak, and he who speaks does not know. How could the common people ever grasp this truth?”
(Zhuangzi, ch. 13, p. 113, trans. Jean Levi, The Works of Master Zhuang, Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances, Paris, 2010).
Stones, endless lines, cracks, holes. Wombs, mineral uteruses. Generators of forms, of objects, of things, of substances. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Joachin Patinir invented his landscapes from a close, thorough study of stones and mosses from which he composed sublime forested mountains. In 1611, Phillip Hainhofer, a merchant from Augsburg, wrote to his brother about the stones he called “florentine”, describing them “mit selbstgewachsenen Landschaften” (with self-generated landscapes”). Hainhofer supplied the duque of Pomerland, as well as the king of Sweden, with his famous kunstschranken (cabinets of curiosities)[1]. Stones as images, stones with images. Stones that generate imaginary landscapes, landscapes arising on stones.
The stones where gestures were first laid upon, the hands, the images. Where images were born. Nurture, matter, mother. Scenario, background, substance, material. Forms from forms. Substances from substances. Countless cosmological traditions in which “man” is made, constructed, and made with pre-existing material: it is a transformation, perhaps a transubstantiation, an animation of that which is inert. Whatever the process, divine, voluntary, random, chemical, alchemical, astronomical, or astrological… All is everywhere, from the tiniest to the greatest, from Pliny to Carl Sagan.
This exhibition looks for these semblances, these relations. It fictionalizes them, establishes them, constantly. It does it especially in the immutability of the mineral world, as Cezanne did in geological structures. It looks for it in the rigour of its framings, in the tactile proximity of textures, in the use of light and shadows. In what is small and big, in what is close and far, in what is inside and outside.
A relation to the world, the whole world, through each concrete element, each concrete individual fragment. Each fragment, each detail is a vestige, a remnant of a path undertaken, a trace. Each one is significative; each tells stories and each one is the item of a collection.
We return to Hainhofer. Kunschranken, kunstkamera, the fashion of the cabinets of curiosities. But also kunst, art, artifice. These deep holes, like these images, return us to opposing poles, in a specular relation that is, after all, photography – that is ultimately, the image itself. Reflexes of light, traces of the sky, clouds on the water that gathered there. Shadows and light. In the landscape tradition of the intangible.
The tradition of landscape, where these works definitely belong is, however, that of the general plane, it is the contemplation of the vastness of the world. Here, in these works, a plane of proximity is imposed, and in each small thing, the vastness of the world is insinuated. Here, we can read a proximity, which I feel like calling “feminine”, of “care” and not of “masculine” “heroicity”.
It is, as in Matisse’s painting, a humanized, modern nature, of people who, when depicted, are swimming and sailing and having fun. These are images where the specular relation between the world and photography, between macro and micro, allows us to think photography metalinguistically, but are not constructed as conceptual objects. And they are also objects of our time, of the Anthropocene: where does nature begin and culture – art, and artifice end?
José António Leitão, 2022
[1] Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Aberrations s.l., Flamarion, s.d., pp. 89, 96.
The Suspension of Time
In Devagar, Catarina Osório de Castro presents a set of square color photographs of varied dimensions, revealing a visual process of investigation in which she disassembles the physical, private and public space in their primordial elements and in their significant details.
The elemental geometrical shapes appear regularly as an effort to organize and to confer meaning to space. We sense, in each photograph, the suspension of time and a determinate movement towards the subject, towards the capturing of its essence.
The contrasting sunlight and the deep shadows also take part in this process of simplification of forms. Tridimensional elements are restricted to their bidimensional correspondents: a rock massif on a beach and a pyramidal funerary monument are converted to triangles.
Elements of vegetation are also recurrent. To the possibility of observing a whole tree, the artist counterposes images which result from a surgical double process of observation. Sectioned tree trunks reveal their elemental forms and allow for an observation of their interior, as if searching for their intimacy while, at the same time, showing, in their rings, the lengthy time of their growth.
The oscillation between public and private space is smoothened by a construction of intimacy in public spaces. The gesture of approximation to subjects and a slow, meticulous observation are the artist’s method of preference for the elaboration of her photographs.
Also at the level of form we observe an oscillation between poles. The recurring presence of water, in diverse contexts and with different plasticities, introduces a dimension of flow and accentuates the melancholic and poetic aspects of the work: a duvet dripping towards the floor, the hair of a friend or the undulating surface of a stone table.
As a whole, this series of images summons the observer to experience Catarina Osório de Castro’s marvel at the world around her and the enchantment that motivates the construction of this visual diary.
Bruno Pelletier Sequeira
Catarina Osório de Castro est une marcheuse infatigable. L'essai esthétique qu'elle propose est la manifestation d’un état à la fois émotionnel et spirituel. La contemplation du paysage devient le vecteur d'une expérience qui la transcende. Penser le paysage, pour la photographe est un exercice d'attention renouvelé. C’est aussi l'effort d'un regard sans préjugé à la recherche d'un code caché, propice aux rencontres secrètes.
Catarina photographe la mer et son action sur l'environnement. Dans ses images, la mer devient un symbole dynamique de la vie. D'une vie infinie et illimitée. C'est un lieu de commencement, de transformation et de renaissance. Le rythme désordonné des vagues sur les rochers, laisse derrière lui une traînée d'enregistrements formels, qui nous ramène à um lieu commun, le corps. Un corpus d'images masculin et féminin. Les éléments constitutifs du paysage sont symboliquement isolés afin de créer un parcours intense et épique. Un voyage dans un temps primordial. Aux origines du monde.
Maria M. Gomes
It took me some time to realize exactly what moved me in Catarina's images. Initially, I was convinced it was the quality of light she could reveal, and I remembered the image of a boy at the top of an escarpment overlooking the sea with his back to the camera, his gaze fixed on the water, and a sand-colored towel fluttering over his bare shoulder. I remember thinking how the intensity of that escarpment - in theory, the driest of landscapes - could serve as a good example of how much a picture can magnify our experience of reality. I confirmed this initial theory in other images that shared, with this one, an assumed tendency for the hyper-representation of textures, for a wide and clear depth of field, for a judicious compositional construction and even for an episodic approximation to the protocols, effects and visual regimes of painting.
Up until a certain time, therefore, my relationship with Catarina's works was based on a kind of formal fascination, as if the astonishment my eyes returned to her images kept me from realizing what was being portrayed beyond the surface. Another image, however, broke this alienation and began to reveal the tangle of procedures, relationships and thematic recurrences that underlie Catarina's practice and have met new and deeper unfoldings in this exhibition. In that image, a young man (the same?) is lying on the grass, his back turned to the camera, his naked trunk sprinkled with small signs, like a map without a territory. The quality of the light, the richness of the textures, the compositional rigor and the pictorial allusion remained, but what was revealed now was, above all, the degree of intimacy supporting this photograph and the way in which the arrangement of what is omitted and what is shown promotes a kind of short circuit in the suggestive valence of the image, preventing our attention from dissipating or from deciphering it.
The fact that this exhibition has earned the title of Eclipse is not entirely causal. In fact, much of what is presented here, and of how it is presented, has to do with this phenomenon of occultation that the idea of eclipse signals: an interposing body, another one fragmented, an all veiling shadow and the halo of things that are hidden and, in this condition, seem to shine stronger. The hiding and fragmenting of the eclipse that brings us here is the fruit of a trained gaze: one that knows how to cut out of a scene everything and only that which will keep us interested. That knows that this interest depends entirely on a denial, a refusal to declare at once its true attempts, and the reverse effect this refusal provokes in the imagination. The less you see, the more you imagine, and this is a secret that Catarina knows only too well.
It is, most probably, why everything in this exhibition is deliberately partial, truncated, dubious. It is all (or almost) at a distance of two steps, this measure that is not close enough for everything to become an abstraction, nor too far for it to become a description. It is a distance that puts us in the place of the participant rather than in the place of the witness and thus leaves us in command of the vehicle of meaning the set of these images will create. Between the angular view of a broken window, the perfect symmetry of a horse's hair, a body resting on an uncertain bed, the windshield of a car that mirrors the city, the blind gaze of a plaster figure in a manor house - the impressive picture of the suggestion to remind us that the narrative is more intriguing when it is silent, the gaze is sharpest when it does not find what it seeks, the sun more ponderous when the moon stands in between.
Bruno Marchand