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The Sweetened Reality of Marcelo Gomes’s Photographs
For the Brazilian-born artist, beauty is in the pulse point.
The remarkable story of the photographer Marcelo Gomes begins in northern Brazil, near the equator. It was wet there. When he was twelve, his parents took him to a concert by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso, a cofounder of the avant-pop psychedelic movement Tropicália, who had been exiled from his home country during its military dictatorship. For Gomes, who grew up in a smaller city, it was a transformative, visceral experience, an introduction to how art could move people. As an adult, in 2016, he took Veloso’s picture at a concert at the Inhotim art gallery in Minas Gerais. I asked Gomes in a recent conversation what he wanted from such portraits of his heroes. “To preserve them,” he says. “There’s a dream where I’m from, a dream of Brazil that sort of dies with him, in a sense, which will be very sad.”
Gomes, who now lives in Paris after years in New York, came to the United States to attend the University of Iowa on a full basketball scholarship. Team sports resonated, he explains, because of the surrender, the subsuming of one’s self into a composite. “There’s something really beautiful about the fact that you’re a collective of very disparate upbringings and cultures and geographies,” he says. “There’s something really nice about just sticking these people together and letting them figure it out. And if they do figure it out, the odds are that they will be much better than the individual.”
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Photography is an individual pursuit that often relies on team collaboration. Gomes makes evocative work entirely for himself but also dips into the fashion world. Lately, he says, the two are blending further, as he’s permitted to use personal work in commercial contexts. His images for Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle feature red rectangular forms, like an olfactory Rothko canvas. He trades traditional advertising’s aspirational charge—buy this so you can be this—for expressions of beauty that are expansive yet found mostly in closely observed moments and things.
A bubble becomes, in its bursting, a portal. A fig beads with ooze. In the end, natural splendor depends on submission. An image from Hydra is all cerulean swoon, but accessible only because someone built a ladder of bent metal and stuck it in the sea. The water is still, but we know those waves. They can pool like the wooden beard Gomes cropped from a large statue he saw in Paris, its ostentatious masculinity virile and swirling. The image is grainy; it could almost be chewed. Gomes calls his world of texture a “sweetened reality.” It’s bigger and beautiful. What more could one want?
All photographs courtesy the artist
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire.”