The Present: An Infinite Dimension is a full account of the photography collection that the Banco Espírito Santo has assembled over the last four years, with over four-hundred and fifty works by one-hundred seventy six artists, both Portuguese and foreign, prestigious and emerging. This highly varied collection of photographic images offers us first-hand knowledge of the changes and advances that have taken place in contemporary art in the last twenty years.
To collect is to capture a particular vision of a time, and a collection must accept that art is the result of a creative, social and historical context. This exhibition springs from the Banco Espírito Santo's desire to share, with a broad cross-section of the public, the need to speak of the present and imagine a hypothetical future through artworks, as well as to offer a panorama of the world that only artists can give us. The BESart collection offers us a plurality of viewpoints, inviting all of us to reflect upon our reality, stimulated by works that illustrate both the marks of the past and diverse cultural. Social, economic and political aspects of our present.
This collection includes works on subjects such as the subjectivity of photography, a return to realism, and the relation between theoretical photography and general easthetics. ln contemporary art, photography has become somewhat less pragmatic, in a technical sense, and more creative, in a poetic one. ln other words, it is more a process than a medium.
Historically, the photograph was a document traditionally associated with the rhetoric of an emotional language that has gone so far as to regulate the perception and evolution of documentary images. Today, however, there are thousands of codes with which to interpret photography and its multiple readings. Until the nineteen eighties, photography was barely accepted as art. That is why postmodernism forces the matter, showing how photography (as an infinitely dispersed representation of reality) is the medium through which we see everything.