The Dutch occupation of Northeast Brazil in the seventeenth century is not widely known internationally. In Brazil, however, it is often romanticized as a period of progress and development, especially when contrasted with Portuguese colonization. Yet, like other colonial ventures, Dutch Brazil was ultimately a commercial enterprise driven by profit and sustained through exploitative and inhumane practices.

In Balbúrdia—a Portuguese word meaning noise, confusion, or mess—artist Patricia Werneck Ribas revisits this chapter of Brazilian history through collage. By deconstructing prints of well-known paintings by Albert Eckhout and Frans Post—artists sent to Brazil to document its landscape, flora, fauna, and people in service of the colonial project—and reassembling these fragments together with contemporary photographs of Brazil and pieces of painted paper, new hybrid images emerge. These compositions suggest creatures of Brazilian fauna and flora, challenging the colonial gaze and proposing alternative visual narratives.

The paintings of Eckhout and Post played a crucial role in legitimizing Johan Maurits’s authority as both a colonial and cultural leader. Their works contributed to early racial classification systems, embedding social hierarchies within European visual culture. In Brazil, reproductions of these images became some of the earliest visual representations of its people and environments, shaping national self-perception through the eyes of the colonizer.

The post Balbúrdia appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.

Angela

Vincent

Noah

Luna

Augusta

Jullie

Wiston

Casper

Nikki

Annika

Amber

Muriel

Rozi

2017

Digital C-prints

For my commissioned portraits, I usually get asked by the subjects if I can do some post-processing, in particular on the skin, in order to make them look better.

Taking this desire for perfection as a starting point, I wanted to subvert the idea of the portrait by creating abstractions, using cloned parts of the face, and randomly disposing them on a blank background.

While image manipulation has become more and more acceptable and, in many cases, a necessary part of image-making, we’re still debating how far we are allowed to go, ethically and realistically.

By only presenting some dots (many of them containing a flaw), I wanted to create abstractions of portraits, where the final image is not revealed and can only be constructed in the viewer’s mind.

The post Blemishes and Flaws appeared first on Patricia Werneck Ribas.