Arts – Photography | B&W exhibition marks Barros’s first solo outing

Creative Macau will present an exhibition of black and white photographs by João Miguel Barros in his first solo outing.

Titled “Between Gaze and Hallucination,” the exhibition will showcase more than 70 of Barros’s recent works.

According to Barros, who is a lawyer by profession, his photos explore the contrast between what people observe in their everyday lives (the “gaze”) and the iconic moments captured in photographs (the “hallucinations”).

Barros regards these as “hallucinations” because they require “genuinely exceptional circumstances [to] reveal them [and] when they no longer portray our gaze rationally, [they] morph instead into representations of our emotions and hallucinations.”

“[The exhibition] is a collection of simple clips, some incidental, snapped in the real world and consciously reproduced in black and white, sometimes charged. They avoid the distraction of colour and the pressure of any form of modernity, encapsulated in our need to focus on the essential in the gaze,” continued Barros.

Barros was born in 1958 in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, but has lived in Macau since 1987.

Barros has a history of involvement in the cultural sector. Between 1979 and 1982, he was co-director of SEMA, a cultural magazine published in Lisbon. Following that, he co-curated a visual arts exhibition titled “Desenhos?” (“Drawing?”), held in Portugal.

In 2013, Barros served on the board of directors of the Foundation for Modern Contemporary Art – Berardo Collection on behalf of the Portuguese government.

“Between Gaze and Hallucination” will open at Creative Macau on February 23 at 6:30 p.m. A book of the same title will be available for purchase during the exhibition.