Our guest today, Daniel Blaufuks, is an artist whose creation is based on the photographic image, film, video and other visual records, originating from the recording of reality, through the functional use of light, its reflection and refraction.
The content of his work constantly crosses memory and history. Both are distinct and provide the clarity of a particular atmosphere.
The archive of objects, places and people constitute a considerable area of his conceptual becoming. It can be considered an activity in which the documentary object acquires a special relevance to enter into the world of ideas that the artist proposes.
Format and size also play a key role in suggesting, and critically perceiving, what is presented. They vary according to the image represented and the purpose of its apprehension, and therefore the scale of its meaning.
Very important and artistically distinctive, the book occupies a central role in the genesis of his work, always perceived as a completely autonomous object. A self-sufficient artistic object with a specific language and, therefore, a defined and individual aesthetic purpose. Travel, literature or dialogue with other authors are often the impetus for their content and optical accounts, which, with each page, are detached from the original reference to other figures, other scenes and appearances or other perspectives.
In our study option (E), architecture is unequivocally not an art and Daniel’s work has apparently nothing to do with architecture. And project work deals, on a daily basis, with the functionality of techniques from other specialities that are more in line with precise engineering codes and numbers, definitely far removed from the relativity of the so-called social sciences’ equivocation. On the other hand, it has already been noted that the reasoning methods of art share common ground with the conceptual methodologies of architecture and, in this case, the work in design theory makes use of analogue and imagistic study systems, the similarity of which can be seen in our author’s reference today: in addition to appreciating the quality, notoriety and celebrity of his work, understanding the construction procedure of his body of work could be a useful and fertile parallel for the theories and practices of design that are being undertaken here, which is why this invitation seemed obvious to us. We thank the illustrious artist Daniel Blaufuks for his presence, for the first time I believe, at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto.Thank you, Daniel.
Nuno Brandão Costa, 24th March 2023