Lavori in corso

The new series of photographs by Eduardo Rezende, taken in 2024, reflects a theme long cherished by the artist: the exploration of urban and architectural spaces, this time focused on construction sites, scaffolding, barricades, and all the structures used for the building, restoration, and maintenance of buildings. At first glance, there’s nothing inherently beautiful or interesting to photograph here, as we’re essentially talking about steel or aluminum scaffolding that we all encounter on the streets of our cities while walking—structures we glance at absentmindedly or even avoid because they signify “work in progress,” an obstacle, or a potential danger.

Living in a big city, scaffolding and buildings under construction are a constant element of the surrounding environment, as are stages, frameworks of various sizes, dust barriers, and safety nets. This massive presence of the construction sector invites cultural and social reflection, not just urbanistic: the urban center understood as the sum of countless stories lived out among streets, buildings, squares, and sidewalks.

This theme is addressed in Rezende’s photographs, which attempt to reverse this perception, offering new perspectives and provoking a series of questions. If construction sites prevent us from navigating spaces as usual, if scaffolding in some cases “ruins” the perception of a facade, or if frameworks block our view of a monument—or worse, if urban construction sites are perceived exclusively as a nuisance—why not try to look at them differently? What if construction sites were an opportunity to temporarily reinterpret urban space? What if they were a chance to create a new system of use for the surrounding space by pedestrians, helping to keep alive the primary function of an urbanized area as a place of life, passage, encounters, relationships, and exchanges?

And further: Can a construction site, with its scaffolding, tarps, and fences, become an opportunity for aesthetic research and experimentation, fostering direct interaction with passersby—a form of “participation” through new perspectives that encourage closer observation of the world around us? Finally, if construction sites are among the most “dangerous” workplaces for workers, how can we make safety within these sites a true priority, ensuring regulations that genuinely protect the health and lives of workers?

To all these urgent and necessary questions, Eduardo Rezende responds with his photographs, which are devoid of human figures and instead focus on the details of structures, highlighting their lines, textures, and the interplay of light and shadow. A significant portion of these new works depicts tents, tarps, and construction fabrics—true “opaque curtains” that filter light in different ways, producing plays of shadows, transparencies, and reflections. The tarps, stretched to varying degrees, sometimes torn or frayed, become the absolute protagonists of the photographic series—a kind of second skin that imprints a shape, a direction, and a different meaning on each photo.

The transparency and opacity of the fabrics, their varying colors, and especially their stripes produce soundscapes, rhythms, and true “musical” sequences. As in music, stripes can represent movements, harmonies, and proportions, sharing the same lexicon: scale, range, tone, line, distance, interval. Above all, they are tied to the concept of order: between man and time, music; and between man and space, stripes.

It is interesting to note that stripes are not a natural mark but a cultural symbol that humans imprint on their environment, adding them to the objects they use. Adding stripes to a surface serves to distinguish it, to make it stand out: a striped object is a created object, a constructed one, like fabric and all structures inspired by the textile world. And if stripes are so present in Eduardo’s photos, it is because they are a dynamic motif, constantly in motion, bringing life to everything they touch. Stripes are always projected forward, drawing attention, and have therefore always fascinated artists, painters, and photographers. Over the centuries, stripes have found their place in paintings, from ancient art to contemporary abstract art. Just think of the work of Daniel Buren, the French artist who appropriated stripes and transformed them into his “visual instrument,” to the point of declaring:

“In the autumn of 1965, at a flea market in Paris, I accidentally came across a striped fabric, the same kind used to make cushions and mattresses, similar to the awnings of cafés and restaurants. I was immediately drawn to this material, perhaps because it resembled the paintings I had been making for over a year. And since those stripes were better than mine, I bought many meters of fabric and started working with it. From 1967 onward, painting gave way to a more conceptual and abstract use of the white-color-white-color sequence. It was only then that I began to think for the first time about the relationship between my works, architecture, and space. It was a crucial reflection for me, a choice I have never abandoned. The stripes, as I said, became a model, an aesthetic instrument open to thousands of possibilities.”

The universe of stripes is, therefore, varied, and the multiple arrangements of colors, along with their different thicknesses and horizontal, vertical, or oblique orientations, enrich the work. In Rezende’s shots, however, order and symmetry occasionally falter due to tears, holes, and folds in the tarps—small disruptions within an otherwise highly organized system. These slight moments of turbulence suggest instability and precariousness. In other cases, it is the scaffolding pipes and joints that “stripe” the space, the tears in the barricades, and the rust on iron bars that make the image more interesting and vivid. These elements are signs of imbalance, simultaneously highlighting and concealing order. They are the details that indicate voids, fullness, openings, closures, dense areas of color, and less saturated ones.

The use of color, in fact, is a crucial element in Rezende’s works, acting as a contrast that breaks the monotony of metal structures and the whiteness of the tarps, while the vibrant tones of the fabrics and the subtle nuances reflected on surfaces lend a particular internal dynamism. The great Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri once said, “Photography is, above all, about renewing wonder,” pointing to the rediscovery of the world’s marvels as the most poetic and sentimental access to aesthetic experience.

Eduardo operates in the same way, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, uncovering what has not been seen, what was not expected or imagined. The range of surprises is found in this world, in the streets, and among buildings under construction. It is not the impressive or the unusual that interests him but the familiar and known space, experienced by the author, photographed, and returned to the viewer. Through these photographs, Eduardo Rezende urges us to seek our own relationship with urban space as a condition of our existence, our being in the world, and he points us toward a new poetics in photography’s identity as a relationship with the environment. In this approach, he recalls the thinking of Gabriele Basilico, one of the most renowned photographers of urban landscapes and architecture, who once said:

“I discovered that taking photos means establishing relationships with people, even if you don’t see them.”

Basilico’s choice to seek a relationship rather than a substance, an experience instead of an object, is also significant for Eduardo Rezende. The artist explicitly renounces constructing the image, opting instead for a relationship, cultivating a vision of photography as a sensory and intimate exercise that leads to engagement with the environment: being inside the photographed objects, absorbed by the context, and capturing the essence of things—scaffolding, metal beams, pipes, and fabrics—and subsequently elevating them from mere utilitarian materials to protagonists of an engaging visual narrative. This narrative is capable of also telling what is unseen, such as the harsh lives of construction workers, the high-risk working conditions, compromised health, and deaths, symbolized in the signs present in some photos as sharp details: “Caution: Work in Progress,” “No Unauthorized Entry.”

A prohibition on accessing places, a barrier that, if it cannot be physically crossed, can be traversed with the gaze, opening the doors of imagination.

Maura Pozzati