Gabriel Wickbold. Collective Matter

Erarta Museum presents an exhibition by Gabriel Wickbold, one of the most influential Brazilian photographers of today. Standing to his credit are appearances at Paris Photo and Xposure art fairs, a collaboration with BMW, exhibitions all across the globe, and GQ magazine’s Men of the Year award.

The artist clearly demonstrates that the Universe is neither centripetal nor centrifugal, man is not the pinnacle of creation, neither cause nor effect, but rather a tiny loop in the global cobweb, no more special than a bunch of fresh bananas or an aged lichen. We are thus offered a glimpse into a world free of such problems as mortality, struggle for existence, or the need to prove one’s uniqueness and soundness. Wickbold’s characters lead the life of watermarks visible on a sheet of paper – not devoid of their own meaning, but clearly secondary to paper of which they are an integral part. A journey through the photographer’s creative universe validates what we have been taught at school: matter is indeed the only thing that exists in the world, and this matter is one and undivided, eternal and yet perpetually changing. There’s nothing excessive about it, it is neither dead nor alive, it has no distances. And if matter is one and we are all part of it, then we are merely different forms of one another.

For the artist it is not a revelation but a given: we are not our own, we are part of the cosmos. In Gabriel Wickbold’s cosmos, everything is in motion, prompting the viewer to join in the kaleidoscopic action and giving one the impression of being pierced with cosmic filaments and enveloped by voids like the characters featured in these images are. We feel that we can transform into stars, turn into emptiness or light. We can become all that simultaneously. Surrounding us are countless stars and celestial bodies that are just like us; near and far, we are all interconnected. After a short while we realize that instead of being pierced by rays of light we emerge from their constellations. Born out of a single energy field, we are but a transformation of the collective star matter. Those who are not afraid to follow the artist one step further might even discover that they are one and the same person with everyone around them.

The magical matter visibly rendered in Gabriel Wickbold’s numerous works offers the viewer a rare chance to experience the epiphany of belonging to a single whole – one only needs to realize that a coffee mug is no different from a doughnut.