FERNANDO AUGUSTO - Os últimos dias de meu Pai
Medium: Digital photography | Dimensions:30,4 x 40,5 cm | Year: 2003

ARTWORK FORMAL DESCRIPTION
A photograph, part of a photographic series, represents a scene inside a house. The picture shows a room whose brick walls are blue; in the center of the room, there is a table with a white patterned tablecloth, over which a vase with flowers. Around the table, there are four chairs. To the left of the table, a black dog looks towards the picture’s viewer. On the wall to the right, a red wooden window is half-open. On the background wall, an open door gives access to another room, in which it is possible to see a table with a lace tablecloth and two paintings on the wall.

the artwork
The photograph was taken at the end of 2003, in Madeiros Neto, south of Bahia. It is part of a series of five pictures and an artist book entitled “The last days of my father”. All of them are set in the same room at different moments and from different angles, following the author’s father’s last days of life. For this exhibition, we chose the photo that depicts the empty room, composed only of objects and decoration of the organized house. The image has its meaning entirely changed when we get to know the story behind it. It is not only about the interior of a simple and organized house. Each decoration’s object has the presence, and the stories lived in that place by its resident, who now departs, but will remain present in the memory of those who knew him.

FOR REFLECTION

In the moment of social isolation that the COVID-19 pandemic imposed on us, permeated by contagion, illness, losses of beloved ones, Fernando Augusto’s work invites us to reflect on farewells. Regarding this work, which is part of a series of photographs and drawings entitled “The last days of my father” and exhibited at Casa Andrade Muricy (Curitiba-PR) in June 2004, he writes in an article: “There, there is the pain, the agony, the scream, what we don’t want to see. Does art help us or comfort us in moments like this? Someone once said that we don’t go to the dentist to treat the good teeth, but the hurting teeth. It is certainly the way how art acts: to talk about what hurts; it is the way through which we work and seek meaning. So much so that I naturally packed, together with my luggage, my photograph and drawing materials, to start that trip to see “seu Josa”, that is how we called him, and say to him goodbye”. He goes on to explain: “Photographing is a way of seeing, naming, and saying goodbye to things. Things go away, but somehow we keep their presence in the images we have of them. It is a way of thinking about what it was and what remains. I decided to take these pictures which are of my father, but I know they evoke, although incompletely, the destiny of all mankind, as Morin writes when talks about Vidal, his father”. And he concludes his reflections: “I remember my father alive, and I think to myself: ‘father, you will only die when I die” (BUENO, 2017). The caring and loving touch with which the artist built this series, and the way he chose to experience such an intimate and painful moment, such as the loss of a father, is actually a great tribute to him; an homage in which art guides us poetically through that that one has no control over – death.