Ivan Padovani, Blind Field #02, 2014. Photography printed on cotton paper and composite of cement and cellulose.

Ivan Padovani is a visual artist and free-lancer photographer, post graduated
in photography from FAAP – Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation.
He contributes to the Digital Photographer Brasil Magazine Brazil, teaches
photography at Panamericana Arts School, Madalena Centro de Estudos
da Imagem and Hermes Artes Visuais.
His research as a photographer is based on architecture and his experience
as a citizen of São Paulo.
Photography is often their primary language, serving as a cataloging tool
and methods of discovery to rearrange and reinterpret the elements that
are faced within the urban context, but additionally note on the results of
their work in constant dialogue with other forms of expression such as
drawing, collage, painting, and sculpture.
Blind Field is a set of anonymous and invisible monuments in the overpopulated
big city skyline. It is a series of blind wall images – a building’s
unexpressive face – reconstructed with mathematical caution and esthetic
rigor that would fully align with the art’s historical references and its recurrent
contemporary utilization.
From the abstractions of the concrete to the conceptual photographic
experiences of Germanic inheritance, Blind Field seems to circumscribe its
area on the foundations of these recent traditions. It indeed does this with
accurate observation and constructive sense in order to attain a component
that we cannot see on the horizon.
The artist removes the buildings from the anonymity of the urban landscape
and gives to each of them a distinctive character, both equally
uniform and unidentifiable – an action that puts back the subject into its
artificial aspect: the perspective removal, the subject centralization, the
color suppression, the frontal capture. Then, white monoliths, plane and
steady, emerge, erected by certain disguised quietude inventoried through
the photographic action.
The blind walls in Blind Field are compact blocks, sometimes hollow matter.
Dualities present themselves in the images, which do not show anything
but flat opaque planes. Nevertheless, peculiar discreet traces of each
building can reveal lines that delimit rooms, flights of stairs, floors, traces
of graffiti, or stains left by the time. Real life indicators in a palpable city.
Solidity yields to both the enigmas of plastic subject facing its photographic
materiality and to the deciphering of its social symbolic condition.
The work escapes from tradition through a subtle experimental process,
yet nonetheless stirring. Oppositions dynamicize in the way the artist
understands and materializes his images.
Blind Field finally developed into a set of various thicknesses, forms and
rhythms, added to a book of translucent pages that plays with the superposition
of the photographs’ whites and greys. The concrete, clear and
silent, of the buildings in this series found in the variety of holders and
spaces is one component in behalf of its language. It is about a city that
appeals to us to read it, or face us with its blank pages; empty subjects,
giant graves, faceless buildings, obelisks without history, or a field mined
with implosions. Cement and paper go together and are incorporated into
the art gallery’s seemingly quietness.