The almost abstract series of prints by Brazilian photographer Bruno Cals could show race tracks, prisons, railroads, or meadows. But what Cals has captured through his lens are in fact some of the world’s most seductive new buildings. In an exhibition on view through July 31 at 1500, a new gallery in New York with a focus on Brazilian photography, what resembles swells of water in Prada turns out to be the facade of Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada store in Aoyama, Tokyo. Another shot shows not an undulating sheen of ice but the Maison Hermès by Renzo Piano in Ginza, Tokyo. Other images offer close-ups not of trophy architecture but of everyday structures that prove just as surprising. What at first glance looks like a lush field is a brick building in Palermo, Buenos Aires, studded with graffiti and crossed by an electrical wire. Cals, an acclaimed fashion and advertising photographer, divides his time between commercial and personal projects, launching Horizons, his first series of architectural images, in 2008. Six of the twelve images in the series—depicting buildings in São Paulo, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires—are on view as digital C-prints, while the rest are displayed on a LCD screen. Probing themes of “presence versus emptiness, and search versus satisfaction,” Cals finds provocative new perspectives in the everyday world around us.
