Luciana Rique (Rio de Janeiro, 1978), lives and works between London and Rio de Janeiro. Her artistic research uses photography as a language, through which she investigates perceptions that are generally unseen and unfathomable. The set of her works aim to create a universe parallel to the surrounding realities. Inspired by a meditative bias, her works touch on minimalism and conceptual issues linked to the modernist heritage of photography.
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Luciana graduated from New York University and then studied photography at Speos, in Paris, where she worked as an assistant to photographer Jean Pierre Dutilleux. More recently, she has been participating in art and photography groups in Brazil and London. She undertakes mentoring with curator Eder Chiodetto and Agnaldo Farias is also an artistic research advisor for her work.
She had her first exhibition, Entreato, in September 2023, in Rio de Janeiro, which was part of the Art-Rio circuit. She participated in the Luis Maluf Artistic Residency in January and February 2024, and presented her works in the collective exhibition at Usina Luis Maluf, and in the Acervo exhibition, at Galeria Luis Maluf, part of the SP-Arte program.
Her studio, in Leblon, Rio de Janeiro, has works available for purchase and can be visited by appointment.
" My work has photography as a language, where my unconscious is visually accessed. It is sensorial, spiritual, reflective and timeless. I use the camera as my brush, translating emotions that I cannot express verbally.
My works transcend this universe that we inhabit and know. They reveal what is hidden inside each of us. When we internalize this image, it is a very powerful representation of some states of mind, of what is repressed and suddenly gains space. I transmit the idea of searching the unknown, of unveiling mysteries.
I am creating and giving voice to an unheard, unspoken, unseen, camouflaged world, a parallel world, where there is no gravity. I'm deconstructing rules and forms. My fictional characters gain a voice, soul, strength; they float, they vibrate, they dialogue and welcome each other. There is this place of a certain silence, a suspension, a levitation, and the work ends up being therapeutic for those who have the ability to contemplate.
My use of blur helps bring this lightness, this mystery, this spirituality. It seems like things are about to escape, it makes us want to get into them, to go beyond. My works slow down our fast pace nowadays, they calm us down; a time that flows more slowly, propelling us into a state of meditation. They make us see something beyond what is, to read between the lines, to enter a crack and not a given place. I create an illusion, mirages; catching something that is in motion, on the way to building an image, without being the image.
Through emotion I am gently griping my way into a new world. I work in the field of synesthesia, I provoke sensations that are not so responsive to our rationality. When navigating this subconscious, I see a new path, an awakening, making me reflect on my life and seek a new path. " ​ ​ Luciana Rique ​
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“Look inside, into the depths, learn first to connect. Only one’s own experience is capable of making a human being wise.”
Sigmund Freud
Luciana Rique in between the photographic gaps
Arising in the context of positivism in the first half of the 19th century, photography appeared as a tool that had the capacity to record and legitimise the occurrence of events in space-time. Its ability to mimic realities and generate images that allow humanity to revisit history, has completely revolutionised our relationship with the past ever since.
Before the 19th century had even come to an end, photographers and artists were already making use of photography and imbuing it with other possibilities, seeing in it the opportunity to fabulate and to make intangible realities and fantasies visible. In the 20th century Dadaists and Surrealists broke down many of the limits that enclosed freedom of expression in photography. Collages, montages, darkroom tricks, solarisation and other experiments led photography to become a place for freer and more unstable existences, subject to the designs of whoever was holding the camera, without losing touch with its social role as an eyewitness of historical time. Documenting and inventing became two of the paths along which photography could proceed. Today we have arrived at the consensus that these two paths are not impervious and the porosity between them shows that documentation can be invention and vice versa.
In the context of contemporary photography, some artists working in the field of metalanguage have made use of this pseudo-dichotomy to bring to light the pulse of fragments from our surroundings that are often invisible to the naked eye, yet their camera-eyes are able to develop strategies that offer freedom wherever this enclosure predominates.
Luciana Rique’s poetic investigation is positioned precisely at this threshold between the unseen and the discovered, between the occult and the apparition. An avid participant in the contemporary art circuit, her gaze as a photographer has been forged in the works of artists who are references for her, such as Donald Judd, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Man Ray and Pierre Soulages.
Her love of these artists has led Luciana Rique to touch on conceptual questions through her photography that we often also see in their work: strategies for destabilising the notion of the two and three-dimensionality of volumes and for fracturing the relationship between figure and background. The capacity to penetrate potent atmospheres by playing with colour and of focusing on a determined form only to make it dissolve within a deeper contemplation, are among the experiments that comprise this artist’s lexicon, as she strives to reconfigure spatial dimensions by offering a type of parallel territory for existential reflection.
Based on these presuppositions Luciana Rique has created, over the last two years, a photographic series that has turned her creative gesture into an intense personal journey within the contours of therapeutic self-analysis. As such, a constellation of images which together can form a parallel world that brings comfort has been formed. These are photographs that seek the most stable and harmonious balance possible between form, light, colour, pattern and texture. At times it seems as though we are in the presence of a photographical haiku, in which the artist aims to achieve an impactful sensorial instance through the bare minimum of resources.
In Luciana’s own words: “In photography I discovered the possibility of creating a parallel world. The photography I practise escapes from a specular and mimetic relationship with the surroundings. I don’t document the visible, but rather parcels of light, the play of colour and volume that are hidden in the landscape. So photography works as a type of detector for new visual potency, new landscapes. They are diaphanous, volatile places, which at the same time take me into a contemplative state in which I feel embraced. I think they are images that offer me the initial stages of meditation”.
In order for photographic images to inspire the path of internalisation and of meditation in engaging with light, tonalities, lines and volumes, an artist must learn how to model this language wisely. Here, in this case, direct photography provides us, through the poetics of Luciana Rique, a renewed, harmonious vision of an unexpected and calm beauty, by carefully spying on everyday spaces that our restless gaze so often tends to overlook.
- Eder Chiodetto, Curator