"André França’s images concern existence, occupancy and the perception of a passerby. Throughout his series, there is an awareness of separation in time and space; the photographs ignite a sense of a fleeting reality and address the temporal nature of our lives. We are presented with a very matter-of-fact kind of photograph which França has described as “a small whirlpool of imprisoned time.” Memory is an ephemeral sense and the images bring us back to a time, not for a confirmation of anything but as a reminder of what is not true.
We are never confronted with faces, only the markings left by humans and nature. Whether it is an overgrown façade or the fading body of a well known icon, França leaves room for interpretation and emotion. He raises the question of time and untimely death, homes turned derelict, and a hint of the general public’s discernment of these passing actions. He photographs from a certain distance to make the viewer feel like a voyeur, privy to the information only present in these photographs as if everything has since disintegrated."
- Oct/2011
Frances Jakubek
Associate Director at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts, USA.
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"The series by André França
revisits a specific type of still
life: vanitas, an allegoric variety of still life in which the objects represented evoke the transitory aspect of human
life and material things. This denomination refers to the famous
Latin verse of the Ecclesiastes, “vanitas
vanitatum, et omnia vanitas”, translated as “vanity of
vanities, all is vanity”. Usually, vanitas presents watches, books, jewelry, coins and other objects that refer
to the transitory values of mankind. Traditionally, the presence of a
skull explicitly alludes to the idea of death or memento
mori (“remember you shall
die”), reinforcing the finitude of our existence before any
worldly concerns."
- Jul/2010
Alejandra Hernández Muñoz
Professor of History of Art at EBA/Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil.
Read the full text about the Vanishing (2010) series.
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"Using a term made famous by Barthes, I would say that the punctum in these photographs lies in their peculiar use of the human figure. This statement may sound a bit odd - after all, obviously no one is portrayed in these pictures. They all document empty spaces, old houses, abandoned places. But it is also obvious that right there, where there is no one to be seen, there has been someone: someone walked through a door, exhausted after a working day; someone leaned over a window, casually observing passers-by; someone sat on a couch and waited anxiously into the night. He who smiled, he who feared, she who desired, she who felt warm, they who celebrated, those who lied and those who kept secrets - they are all here, in these photographs, displaying what will be left of us in the future: a few erratic traces, semi-legible words in a chaotic palimpsest, and sketches of incomplete narratives."
- Apr/2008
Antonio Marcos Pereira
Literary critic and Professor, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil.
Text about the Houses and Time (2004) series.