In this photograph, The Boy appears dead in his coffin. A camera ardente (Portuguese for “burning chapel”) is a chapel designed to accommodate and mourn a deceased while awaiting the funeral ceremony. In Northern Portugal, this was an important place for social interaction – to see and be seen. It was also common practice to photograph the dead in their open caskets. 

SELF-REFLECTIONS is a series of satirical and surreal self-portraits, presenting a repertoire of four personalities that live inside the same person. Photographed as archetypes and fairy tale characters, they are named: The Villain, The Joker, The Prince and The Boy.

The images, meticulously constructed like paintings with in-depth work on their characterisation, colour and style, form allegorical tableaux whose narratives intertwine artistic, cinematic and philosophical references. They evoke the construction of identity, childhood, death, freedom, madness… sometimes to comedic effect.

Irony and subversion invite the viewer to a striking world filled with a strange chromatic unreality, a theatre of the absurd where a single actor plays all the roles.

— Présences Photographie, Montélimar (France), 2022.