We know that seven years are much longer than seven nights, much more than seven times. If after seven years the things became cloudy, the movement of the photographer advances, “water of encounter,” as he says. Here is point number two: what destiny will his photographs take? There is a line like a sunset, an elliptical line in each of these images. And another, reborn with the sunlight that asks: “And me, where is my face?” And if there are mirrors, why is that woman, fleeting between shadow and concrete, projected in a vertical epigraph before the post, like a message, like a shadow? The woman walking toward the next instant. Could it be that the next annunciation will come from her? All of these characters fit into a reliquary where everything is matter, and contraries and stumps and feathers, since in the photographer’s images stone and flesh become part of the very same material. Even though in a “cloudy” way, the photographer perceives the city (the land) and its foundations to exteriorize an intimate sensation that only existence is able to construct, and which – based on his rectangular focuses – he faces in light of the questions, the myths, the gods. This is the dialogue that makes the flying arrow remain at rest. If these myths of Christianity and Candomblé are joined and appear in the certainty of all the images – since each one of them, as unthinkable as it be, announces a religious and silent aesthetic – the answer for what we call “seeking” (what will come afterward?) is perhaps found in three outdoor images made in the neighborhood of Castelo Branco, where the artist lives: in a composition seen from the other side of the street, two abandoned cars are practically falling to pieces behind a half-opened gate. What does this image mean? In Mario Cravo Neto’s work, everything. Here we find the strangeness in a memorial photograph: two cars in a vacant lot. Nothing more than this. It is the rare photographer who transforms a visually imperceptible situation into an instant where the gaze can linger in search of its symbols. The second image features a façade under construction. The absence of any person in the scene instills the same thermometer of time. They are forms which, now seen from the outside, lead us to the abyssal exercise that the photographer has always carried out in his studio: it is almost an object, that advertisement of an advertisement of what will be a dwelling. Behind everything, an Exu is already in charge of the place I return once again to the third image because I want to return to Stéphane Mallarmé (“... the ebony cloths of night”): the woman who walks toward a post, along the road called Estrada Velha do Aeroporto. It is a very recent image, like that of the two cars, like that of the construction and its Exu behind the walls. It was made when the photographer was on his way home. There appeared that woman of Oxum. She and what her presence provokes within the image, seven years afterwards. She and her inexistent shadow before the shadow of the post. Another nothing. Another immense photograph. This, therefore, is Mallarmé: “Finally a noise was exhaled that sounded like the escape of the absurd condensation of the precedents, but possessed of a known animus, and the shadow heard nothing more than the regular beating that seemed to permanently flee like the prolonged fluttering of some night guest aroused from a heavy sleep. And if some plumage had ever brushed these walls it could only be the feathers of the genius of a species wishing that these shadows, on both sides multiplied infinitely, would loom like pure shadows and each carry the volume of its destinies, and the pure clearness of its conscience.” When I flew over Salvador on my way back home, there was no longer any air in Gilda’s lungs. How could I live without her voice? The city was vanishing in the early morning: the white walls of Avenida Contorno; the street noises in the ancestral alleyways; the thicket of memory in the sacred pulpit. I opened the photographs once again. It was then that the second woman appeared: faceless, seated on an anonymous curb in Bom Jesus da Lapa. The tin basin in her hand like an epigraph of her existence. It is a photograph that advances over time. It throws itself over each and every one of us. It is a request for answers. This is the secret that Mario Cravo Neto will have to reveal seven years later: if the arrow in movement is really an arrow at rest. Diógenes Moura A journalist, writer and screenplay writer,

Diógenes Moura serves as curator of photography at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.