HUBBLE

In this series, the starting point is the appropriation of images of the cosmos (nebulae, galaxies, etc.) captured by the telescope of the same name. These images are processed on a computer, where they are first transformed into black and white images, eliminating the arbitrary colors assigned by physicists for other purposes. Subsequently, in some of the works, an inversion is performed where black becomes white and vice versa, distancing the images from the usual appearance of the cosmos. The luminous point of a star transforms into a dark, graphic point against a new light background, fostering a connection with drawing, engraving, and Veiga's own painting work. Occasionally, the artist chooses not to perform this inversion, and in that case, the subsequent manipulation is more radical, also to maintain a visual distance from the outer space we observe. Then, some of these resulting images, or parts of them, are gathered and processed in an editing program, through cutouts and distortions that follow mathematical functions, in order to create a fictional, poetic space with new and invented relationships between different portions of our cosmos. Other universes made from our own, or rather, made from indices, scientific representations of it, the Hubble images.

︎︎︎  Bravo! Magazine - Artist's studio

Manoel Veiga graduated as an Electronic Engineer, having been a grantee at the Physics Department. This experience has influenced his artistic work, not only in his paintings where he uses natural phenomena like diffusion and gravity but also in his photographic series like “Dark Matter” where he uses a computer to intervene in Caravaggio’s work in order to discuss the representation of natural space in art. The artist received Bravo! Magazine in his studio in November 2018 to talk about his paintings and the Hubble and Dark Matter series.
Directed by Henk Nieman. Duration of 5 minutes. English subtitles.