Artists

Rosângela Rennó

Press release

mor charpentier is pleased to present Histórias de Fotografias [1997-2025], the second solo show in Paris by Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó. Often described as a "photographer of memory," Rennó defends the idea that there is not just one, but multiple histories of photography. In the face of the uninterrupted flood of images saturating the contemporary world, Rennó adopts a radical stance: she takes almost no photos herself, choosing instead to anchor her artistic practice in gleaning and immersion. She thus explores what she calls "second-class photos": discarded family albums, slides, and anonymous documents found in flea markets or deep within public and private archives, many of which have been abandoned. Her practice is structured around a deeply committed archival work, driven by the desire to restore essential visibility to overshadowed narratives. The exhibition opens with a dialogue between three of the artist's emblematic series, Cerimônia do adeus, Nuptias, and Bodas de porcelana, which explore the systematization, codification, and staging of the ritual of marriage, casting an ambiguous gaze, combining affection and derision, upon the photographed couples. With Cerimônia do adeus (1997-2003), she captures the vulnerability of the image through forty black-and-white photographs of Cuban newlyweds from the 1980s, captured at the moment of farewell inside 1950s American cars. This reveals a dual tension: the symbol of a prosperous future inherited from the American way of life, and the paradox of a desire for escape on an island from which one cannot escape by car. In response, the Nuptias (2017-2024) series brings together around 130 "photo-paintings," where painting, cutting, and collage pay homage to the tradition of painted portraits—still very common in northeastern Brazil—and celebrate the plurality of romantic unions. Finally, Bodas de porcelana (2017) extends this reflection through twenty secondhand, decorative Chinese porcelain plates: arranged in pairs, the plates comment as much on the passage of time through wedding anniversaries as they do on the fragility of the marital bond. This gaze on intimate rituals then shifts toward the public sphere to analyze the instrumentalization of photography by governing authorities. Throughout her career, Rosângela Rennó has appropriated institutional archives to subvert these images, which once served to impose political and scientific power. By exhuming documents designed to profile, classify, and oppress marginalized populations, the artist performs a true visual archaeology. In the Cicatriz (1996-1998) series, she enlarges the bodily details (scars, tattoos) of inmates profiled in São Paulo, wrenching these subaltern bodies from the dehumanizing coldness of anthropometric theories. The Vulgo (1997-2003) series extends this critique of disciplinary control by utilizing the original photographs of prisoners' skulls. Subtly colorized, they expose the violence of physiognomy (a pseudoscience claiming to determine an individual's morality and criminal tendencies from their physical traits) while highlighting their "aliases" (nicknames)—the inmates' ultimate attempts at resistance against a programmed oblivion. The Seres Notáveis do mundo (2018-2022) series expands this archival archaeology to the plaster busts of colonial phrenologist Pierre Dumoutier, who claimed to determine an individual's character traits and mental faculties by analyzing the shape and bumps of their skull. By printing these casts of "captured" anonymous subjects onto marbled paper, Rennó merges figure and background to unmask the Western anthropological gaze. Faced with this repressive State apparatus, the artist goes beyond simple documentary observation. Through the appropriation of images from various types of archives, both private and public, her work is structured as a revalorization of the individual and of personal stories that serve as an antidote to political erasure. In the series Corpo da Alma (o estado do monde) (2006-2009), the artist explores the magical and memorial dimension of the portrait through protesters carrying photographs of missing or deceased loved ones. The artist thus offers a new photographic body to these souls and pays tribute to press photographers through an enlarged pixel grid which, when viewed too closely, protects the subjects' privacy from prying eyes. This transition from an intimate trajectory to collective force also unfolds in Operação Aranhas Arapongas Arapucas (2014-2018), a series composed of triptychs linking three major waves of Brazilian protest (1968, 1984, and 2013). By associating these temporalities, Rennó shows how a crowd transforms into an indomitable force capable of making torturers waver: each protester, extracted from the anonymity of the masses, carries within them a fragment of the DNA of this resistance, reaffirming the power of the people to take back control of their destiny and their iconography. Alongside this popular emancipation, Rosângela Rennó directly tackles the narrative of war and the military through the Série vermelha (militares) (Red Series - military) (2000-2003) and the book Aucune bête au monde (2019). In Série vermelha (militares), composed of sixteen vernacular portraits from family albums showing men and children posing proudly in uniform, the artist enlarges the images to human scale and saturates them with a "blood-red veil" that requires visual effort from the viewer to decode the hidden shapes. This gesture absorbs the subjects' identities into an anonymous, collective mold in order to deride the vanity of the martial pose while reawakening dark memories of the military dictatorship in Brazil. In contrast to this chromatic saturation, Aucune bête au monde directly attacks the editorial object by appropriating a 1959 book on the Algerian War of Independence written by two French army officers. She masks the faces and bodies of the military personnel under opaque gray ink and cuts out pages in a process of opacification and erasure that becomes a tool for political sabotage, elevating her message to a radical and universal condemnation of the madness of war. The exhibition journey concludes with L'Imagem Persistente (2019), where Rosângela Rennó explores the disappearance of material photography in the face of the digital flow, noting that in the smartphone era, humans paradoxically cling to the camera icon. Through a multitude of repurposed everyday objects (toys, USB drives, lighters, or clothing) mimicking old devices, the silhouette of the camera survives. Although devoid of technical function and unable to capture reality, these simulacra act as symbols associated with the era when photography was recognized as a document. Today, the digital image is linked more to communication than to the status of a document. Spanning nearly three decades of creation, Histórias de Fotografias [1997-2025] highlights Rosângela Rennó's remarkable work of visual archaeology. By dissecting the phenomena of collective amnesia, institutional manipulation, and technological dematerialization, the artist does not merely exhume the debris of the past: she radically redefines the power of the image in the face of History, turning art into a true counter-power against oblivion.