The magic and the magician
I have known Mario Cravo Neto for a long time and learned to admire the fertile world of his art. His restlessness always took him to new ways: he can never be that person that repeats himself. No matter how much success he makes, he is always jumping from one language to another, and, what is better, from one thought to another, illuminating his everyday reality with different lights. Cravo Neto does not have a servile relationship with reality. He is always trying to reinterpret it with his camera, to disclose new dimensions in our life which we never see with commonplace eyes. His quick and pervasive eye is always trying to delve into the core of the objects which he selects to photograph or, better than that, which he engenders and then photographs.
When Cravo Neto is dealing with everyday reality, one can easily notice the violation of the normal code - that is, the new angle or angles which he focuses and captures in this frozen or freezing time that is photography. In this case, the magician is transforming simple reality into magic in what we can call an alchemic procedure. This procedure achieves a high degree of metamorphosis when the object of the artist’s eye is the moveable universe of the Candomblé, the African religion that survived in Brasil. Now, Cravo Neto does not endeavour to capture a fugacious reality but, much more than that, to capture the imponderable mistery beyond the mere images of an iniciatic religion.
The person and the object of the Candomblé have, in themselves, naturally, a visual aspect and an innermost meaning which is partaken only by the other initiates in the same group.
Cravo Neto not only captures a very deep an dense angle of Candomblé signs but he exerts a profound reading of the permanent mistery of this esoteric religion. And he can do it better than anyone because he is an initiate; he is an insider. His eye is turned to look well and trained to see better. What matter is not the quality of the camera or of the emulsion layers of the film, not even the technic of the photographer. What matters is the powers of perception, the well-trained eye of the photographer that upon photographing the outside can give an interpretation, can read deeply into the relative truth of the theme, which is apparently ephemerous in the rituals but whose permanence is revealed by the photograph.
This reading gets more vivid when Cravo Neto searches for elements of comparison. When he puts side by side samples from the African cult and sheer European elements which, rather than opposing the African trend, integrate themselves and help explain the African alchemy because, deep inside, they say about the same. That’s one important point in Cravo Neto’s discourse - he looks for resemblances, points of contacts, not for an artistic apartheid. After all, we are human beings and have common archetypes. The difference reposes, basically, in the language - art is only one, but it expresses itself with different tools, different vocabulary. When Mario Cravo Neto holds for depth beyond the surface, he looks for a more endurable and significant art.
Ildásio Tavares
June 17th 2004
Poet and Otun Oba Aré of the Axé Opô Afonjá
