CUPIDO, Paul - Amazonia

Statement by the photographer, Paul CUPIDO

"I aim to engage with the world with wide-open senses. My work is about the magic moments of life as well as its inconveniences. I want to take pictures, while forgetting about the process of photography, until I’m saturated with an existential sense of life. Every step I take begins with the notion of ‘mono no aware’: the transience of everything, the gentle melancholy of things, being sensitive to ephemera." (© Paul CUPIDO)

Background information

"From the leaves to the trees, and from the endlessly intricate ‘wood wide web’ to the wisdom of the indigenous peoples, there is perhaps no place left on earth that is imbued with more spirituality than the Amazon rainforest. During his artist’s residency at 'Labverde', a programme for artistic immersion in the Brazilian Amazon, Paul CUPIDO took his camera and entered into a silent dialogue with this enchanting and mystical environment, focusing on leaves, foliage, water, and the moon. His photographic work revolves around the principle of mu, a philosophical concept that is open to countless interpretations. Mu can be considered a void, albeit one that holds potential. With ‘Amazônia’, he explores the ephemeral and symbolic correspondences between the body and the earth." (© Alauda, 2019)

Book review

“The artistic image is invested with magical powers. Applied to the skin or surface of objects, the images allow to flex the boundaries between beings and connect them to the surrounding universe. It is no wonder that the Kaxinawa call the spirits yuxin, the word that is used to designate images as well as photographs. The images present themselves as points of contact between the visible and the invisible, between the soul and the body, between fixity and the ephemeral, between the flux and the affirmation of existence.” (© Hugo Fortes)

About the Dutch photographer Paul CUPIDO (b. 1972)

Photo books by Paul CUPIDO