Diogo Evangelista's (b. 1984, Lisbon) mesmerizing print of a photograph of a compact disc (CD) is a surface for contemplation. Its enlarged scale confronts the human body as a mirroring rainbow of compressed information that one cannot access. The promise of this oracle—a horizon of dead media encryption—encloses in itself the mood of a decade, the rave-y ’90s, where as much was physically and technologically synthesized as collectively exorcized.
The techniques of simulating altered perceptions are something that interest Evangelista. These are referred to in the hidden context of his visual narratives, strongly deployed by accurate eyes which drift through the endless labyrinths of the archives of the Internet.
Many other works by Diogo Evangelista examine the limits of human cognition. Creating found-footage-led narratives that often appeal to synaesthesia—a sense impression relating to another part of the body that it is associated with; for example, dissociative perception through vision and hearing—as its main medium, we are guided by chromatic and visual oscillations that disturb our cerebral hemispheres in a rhythmic unravelling that breaks the linearity of perception.
Sungazing (2013) is a video composed of lengthy panoramic camera movements over a series of images of Moroccan carpets, accompanied by abstract drone sounds of Iranian origin. The film starts as it ends, with a close-up of the sun, progressively zooming out to a crescendo, and marking the importance of spatial scale throughout the film, almost referencing the Eames's film Powers of Ten (1977), which is composed of zoom exercised in progressive scale from outer space to a picnic blanket in California. The title of the video refers to a very old exercise—that of prolongedly gazing at the sun,,practiced since Ancient Egypt till today as a method of meditating and self-inducing visual hallucinations. MM
self-presentation:
It all began just after entering high school when I was 15.
The first exercise at school was to find on the street a surface to paint over.
The teacher brought us a set of images to be projected and painted over those found objects.
I chose a 150-centimeter-wide dirty white hardboard square. The only paint I had was black.
From the available images, I picked a set of Robert Indiana styled letters spelling: F, U, C, K.
From that day on, I found shelter under these letters.
That same year, in a museum close to my house, I saw a painting by Francis Bacon. That painting introduced me to horror.
I met the wizard Lee “Scratch” Perry in an underground bar in Lisbon some years later. He showed me how to be mystical in our time.
Another encounter was with David Foster Wallace´s kaleidoscopic Infinite Jest.
Finally, the birth of my daughter Laura. She showed me life flowering from a seed.
