Associação Cultural Videobrasil

In the trajectory of Luiz Duva, from São Paulo, the construction of personal video narratives unfolds into two sophisticated, complementary lines of research: on the one hand, the perfecting of artistic practices that allow one to recover and bring “to the surface of the image” senses and sensations usually ignored by this type of medium; on the other hand, the attempt to expand the audiovisual experience beyond the limits of duration and medium. While the first line leads Duva to experiment with different shapes and media, from single channel to installation, from VJing sessions in dance floors to the immersive environments where he carries out his live image sessions, the second line of research pushes him further and further into image-where he discovers different ways of manipulating, deconstructing, and playing the frames, improvising, redrawing, and incorporating chance in order to attain plastic power and convey subjective contents. 

The body and its limits have been the main theme of Duva's art since his early works, which he considers to be “explosions” of a straight from the gut, unconscious creative drive, rather than conceptual creations. Born out of the combination of two casual sequences-images of Duva's grandmother and of a forbidden walk through an abandoned factory-, No time to cry, 1988, already boasts unusual experimental density and perception of the medium, above all in the angst-ridden camera motion that matches the sound, a sort of repetitious, circular buzz. This experimental power, which defies the lack of resources, persists in A paixão segundo Bruce (1989), an ironic step towards a narrative style, and in Deus come-se (1990), a flirt with both the grotesque and the plastic aspects of art. In Jardim Rizzo (1992), the same scene is viewed from the perspective of each character, in an exercise that questions the reduction of the audiovisual experience down to a single, compulsory point of view.

The artist went from narrative experiments, which dealt with the narrative itself, to working on the plastic construction of scenes-or, as he put it, to the discovery of “image as a picture.” The bodymen lost in heaven (1996) is a landmark in this respect: in addition to the conflict between the featured couple, the unique aesthetic composition ties together the elements of the work, with scenes, colors, and visual arrangements reminiscent of the artist's classic painting references. The bodymen puts Duva on the path of installation work, a natural vocation of the image/picture. 

Three years later, INSPIREme (1999), which shows the image of a girl breathing in a big vertical plasma screen, inaugurated a long series of installation-portraits with a more plastic verve. Prior to that, the experimental quest down the path of installation led the artist toward an element which, once mastered, would become central in his work: the sound. In Ignácios (1998), built around the poem Pranto por Ignacio Sanches Mejias, by Federico García Lorca, it is the soundtrack (the first one Duva ever scored) that provides the work with direction, materializing his initial intention of conveying to the audience a feeling of being “smashed” by image. 

Also around the time of INSPIREme, Duva traded the analogic editing room for nonlinear editing, dramatically changing his possibilities of manipulating image. If a resource such as slow motion used to be hard to obtain, now he could treat images in a physical way, just as DJs do with sounds, playing them like percussion, scratching them. In his relationship with this new realm of parameters for modifying images-and with the graphic character of timeline editing-the artist discovered the possibility of improvisation, of intervention as a rhythmic gesture, as well as the possibility of finding, in motion, “the power of the still image.”

The possibility of manipulating images-sounds live provided Duva's art with a feature that would become a staple of his work: the action-like quality. His installations became hybrid, as they took over the premises, and became performances-such as A mulher e seu marido bife and PVC, both featured in the programme of the 13th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival, 2001. The idea of placing the image inside an ambience, the improvisation, and the performance-like quality also brought the artist closer to the dance floors of electronic music, where he saw “sensorial installations he would never be able to match.” 

In the following years, Duva organized the first VJ showcase ever carried out in Brazil, the Live Images (featuring VJs and collectives such as Jodele, Spetto, Embolex, Duva, Bijari, Lucas Marguti, Raimo, Alexis, feitoamãos, and Palumbo), and performed alongside DJs such as Junkie XL, 808 State, Jeff Mills, The Youngsters, Anderson Noise, Stereo Total, Patife, Marky, and Joe Carter-as well as Fat Boy Slim, from England-in an event attended by over 180,000 people in Rio de Janeiro. 

The artist's experience as a VJ, an intense specialization period in live image manipulation, proved limited-due to the impossibility of controlling “the full power of sound-image”-, but provided him with moments of great discovery. In Turin, Italy, 2005, during his presentation at the Cluster magazine lounge, Duva attempted to guide his improvisations with colors and shapes not by music, but by the flow of people through space. For the first time in his work, he treated images as light, rather than as signs.

Also in 2002, the focus of Duva's art shifted from VJing to work based on live image manipulation, and immersive environments. A poem, strawberries on his living room floor, and an endoscopy were the elements in the first of these exercises, Vermelho sangue (2002). In the most widely known exercise, presented at the 14th Videobrasil, 2003, Duva performed a live manipulation, to the sound of two remixed electronic tracks, of previously edited excerpts of the work Made in Brasil, in which Brazilian video pioneer Letícia Parente embroiders the sole of her own foot (Desconstruindo Letícia Parente: Marca registrada). 

While studying the “possibility of expanding image to within image itself,” generating new images and sounds by creating an expanded dimension, the artist discovered what he dubbed motion cells: sequences of meaningful images that, when manipulated, would produce different tempos and rhythms. Beginning with documentary material, Duva attained the cells that provided the foundation for the performance Concerto para imagem, som e marreta sobre parede, a part of the exhibition Imagem não Imagem (2003); using digital pictures taken with a cell phone, which he animated using a panoramic software, Duva created the triptych Retratos in motion: o beijo (2005), an immersive environment installation that marked his first appearance on the screen. In both of these works, the live manipulation treatment seeks to retrieve “the image behind the image,” that is, the subjectivity and intensity of the moment that kicks off the entire creative process.

That same line of thought gave birth to the following works: the installation Demolição (2004), a mechanism that, with the push of buttons, produces projections of a wall being demolished, along with percussive sounds; Grotesco Sublime MIX (2005), which transforms material produced during a workshop of Teatro da Vertigem into a triptych of bodies that devour one another; Tríptico: estudo para auto-retrato 1, which garnered him the Le Fresnoy Audiovisual Creation Award - France at the 15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival; and Concerto para células em (de) movimento, a multimedia performance project inside an immersive installation that will be conducted using an audiovisual score-capable of defining improvised movements-the theme of which will be inner landscapes.