Mario Lalau

Mário Lalau (São Paulo, SP, 1978) Currently lives in Texas. Has a bachelors degree in Administration and a postgraduate degree in Communication and Arts. He has worked as a photojournalist for Grupo Folha de São Paulo and has published in some of the main news media in Brazil. He then worked as a Fashion Photographer. In the last 5 years he has been dedicated to his own projects like “Tropeço”.

 

Tropeço

Text by: Eder Chiodetto

Mario Lalau joins the tradition of street photographers who wander the cities adrift, as the flaneur, the wandering character of Charles Baudelaire. Every corner turned, you renew the possibilities of meeting with the fortuitous, the unexpected, and stimuli that will make this atavistic need to scour the living space an exciting possibility of new adventures.

To repeatedly go through the same spaces in our customary displacements, we naturally tend to stop seeing them in detail. The flow will gradually automate itself. We tend to see a whole that is equal, repetitive and boring, suppressing the ability to perceive the subtle changes with which the sum of the days incessantly sculpts the landscape.

This photo essay of Mario Lalau seems to be a kind of manifesto that goes against this discourse of the pasteurization of the global landscape. As a solitary traveler, he likes to walk aimlessly to unravel the cities wherever he goes. The camera acts as a propellant engine that is obstinately moving forward in this wanderer’s displacement. Far from the usual photos of the accidental tourist in your images we do not see the city that is proud to show its monuments, its lush architecture, its historical landmarks. What Lalau reveals, with his ability to notice chance, the ironies and the gags that seem to be revealed just to him in the public domain, is something that results from the substrate of human relations, the pacts of conviviality, the silent social and behavioral rules.

These chance encounters between form and meaning, objects and utilities, logic and deviations, nature and culture, that the artist catches in his wanderings, generate a plethora of sculptural events which together create a precise chronicle of the contemporary man’s theater of customs.When faced with your images we often laugh at our own beliefs and idiosyncrasies. An oblique way of seeing that can activate a decisive critique about our days pulling from the unusual and humor.

To view more of Mario Lalau’s work please visit his website.