"The photographic landscapes of times bygone, faithful to a well established pictorial tradition, in which the viewer is guided by lines that lead him to the centre, and led to explore paths/surfaces harmoniously studied, the fruit of an image composition obedient to a thoughtful game of over-complex light effects, ceded place to the contemporary neutral light of real "infra-landscapes", refuges of an infinite quietude where traces of an ancient dimension of the sacred persist, granting them the status of new poetic objects, that resist any rhetoric of viewing and, as such, often become opaque.
The work of Paulo Abrantes falls precisely into this new dimension of the landscape photographic rendering. His images, while presenting themselves as the photographic receptacle of an experience - the mental experience of the discovery of natural signs that remain beyond the humanization of space - prefer the frontal restitution of the landscape to the exploration of the smallest, but densest traces, that allow us to build it mentally, guessing it, in its disconcerting harmony, its mute dramas, in its silent decomposition and in the resurrection that time perpetually assures."
Manuel Miranda
Photographer and History Teacher