A journey with Faenza Printing into the surprising visual musings of an extraordinary photographic artist.
“It Looked, and I Looked Back” is a monographic photography book that collects the pictures of the Brazilian artist Marcos Chaves, who has been developing and sharing with us his art and creativity since the 80s, with cross-genre works and projects which reflect his vision of reality through words, photographs, sound installations and videos.
The peculiarity of his art consists in creating visual poetry and alternative representations of life by interpreting the reality that surrounds us, translating and overturning the values and meanings of objects, landscapes and everyday words.
His extraordinary way of seeing and depicting reality, places, everyday objects, as well as the variety of ways he reflects aspects of the human soul, makes Marcos Chaves one of the most interesting and original contemporary artists.
In the volume “It Looked, And I Looked Back”, published by KMEC Books, we see the photographic portrait of the artist’s daily domestic life. This unique, self-conceived artist’s book opens a portal into the author’s personal world, instilled with playful inventiveness, humor, and witty eroticism.
Here Chaves explores his domestic environment, and he does it as only he knows how to do, that is, with irreverence and natural spontaneity, giving the reader uncanny pictures that on first glance appear deceptively simple, but upon a second look reveal surprising plays of light and (in)voluntary eroticism, also revealing ingenious and playful references to the history of art.
This is a book that captivates on multiple levels—both conceptual and visual— activating all five senses in the reader.
Faenza Printing’s printing and slipcase manufacturing
Faenza Printing, who has been involved in the printing of high quality art and photography books for years, recently collaborated with American publisher KMEC Books on “Marcos Chaves: It Looked, and I Looked Back”.
Consisting of 248 pages of primarily full bleed photographic images, printed 5 colors with UV LED technology on Arctic Volume White paper.
The cover, which features one of the artist’s most iconic images, has been produced with UV LED printing and 2 different silkscreens.
The deluxe binding is constructed as a Swiss bound hardcover with a half-canvas cover.
The limited-edition version of the book, produced in a run of only 50 copies, is housed in a striking cardboard box, produced by Faenza Printing and Faenza Couture. It is a refined and elegant slipcase lined internally and externally with Colorplan paper, finished with a die-cutting in the holes on the front to show the cover of the book.
Faenza Printing, with an obsessive attention to the smallest details, gave this prestigious coffee table book the technical know-how, care and high quality that we love to deliver for all of the projects we are are working on.
Contact us to discover all our printing solutions, not only for art books for any kind of project you can dream of!
Brazilian artist Marcos Chaves (born 1961) uses photography, installation, video, texts and sound to alter the way we view the world around us. Chaves has amassed an extensive archive of photographs he began taking in 1995, in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Venice, Dubai, Paris and New York. The images are of landscapes, found objects, strange and mundane urban topologies and phenomena. Chaves has arranged hundreds of these images into enigmatic diptychs which are presented in his new artist’s book It Looked and I Looked Back (KMEC Books). Here Chaves explores his surroundings through seemingly casual snapshots with plays of light and involuntary eroticism that reveal playful references to art history.
Marcos Chaves was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1961 and began his artistic endeavors in the early 1980s. By using appropriation and intervention parameters, the artist works in diverse media, openly moving between the production of objects, photographs, videos, drawings, words, and sounds.
Bernardo Mosqueira is a curator and writer based in New York. He is Chief Curator at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), in New York, and Artistic Director at Solar dos Abacaxis, Rio de Janeiro. Since 2011, he has directed Premio FOCO ArtRio, a national award for emerg- ing artists in Brazil. Between 2021 and 2023, Mosqueira was the ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum, where he curated or co-curated several exhibitions.
Luisa Duarte is an art critic and independent curator based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. She is the coeditor of ABC: Arte Brasileira Contemporânea (with Adriano Pedrosa, Cosac Naify, 2014) and No tremor do mundo: Ensaiose entrevistas à luz da pandemia (with Victor Gorgulho, Editora Cobogó, 2020). In 2023, she curated the exhibition Janaina Tschäpe: Stars talking out loud at the Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
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