Sculptor Richard Serra tells us how the childhood experience of watching a ship being launched made an impression on all his later work. The ship's black hull, disproportionately horizontal , first dipped towards the bow, semisubmerged, but then it rose again until it found its balance. The ship, an enormous dead weight on land, became a free and floating structure in the sea...

In Cássio Vasconcellos' pictures, texture becomes a means to an end, building up dense vegitation in which everything else is buried. The space between things - always full, as though taken up by water - works like a glue, connecting objects and planes of varying dimensions. The textureis what provides a link between the image's figures, which are cut and juxtaposed without any retouches, creating the same luminescence of old-fashioned photomontages. It cements the different elements into one image, bringing together landscapes from different starting points. The landscape becomes a massive horizon from which the photographer has torn the contour of things.

Nelson Brissac Peixoto
From the FotoFest 2004 Catalogue