by Susan Jensen

Patricio Tasisto's photographic art exhibit introduced me to a word and concept missing from English.

Saudade – pronounced "Saugh-dah-jey" is a word unique to Portuguese. It means a deep yearning for a loved one who is absent or dead, or longing for something profound that is missing in one's life. What an important and very much needed word.

Patricio, an Italian raised in Brazil, lost his mother at age five. His artist father encouraged him to express his grief through art and music. In addition to being an accomplished Viola da gamba player and violinist, Patricio has been working with photography since age 13.

The photographs in this exhibition are conceived as visual representations of his memories achieved through blurred images of various women
Just as our memories shift with time – fading, blurring, losing detail –Patricio's photos start to lose human shape, eventually becoming an abstract piece of art that doesn't resemble human form. The power of the photographs seem to intensify as the image progressively blurs, distilling down to a simple few lines, the way memory distills down to a few key points. The way, if we are lucky, we distill down to our truest essence with age, the one we were born with that got covered over with whatever protections we used to get by in this world.

Patricio's work speaks also to the fact that we, the ones doing the remembering, are changing over time and thus a new person is remembering the past in new ways. I recently came across an article about how most of the cells in our bodies replace themselves over time. That means the memories of what happened to us twenty years ago happened to some other us: many of the particles in our body now weren't there at all. So how can we say that our actual memory of what happened 20 years ago is the same as what happened then? Patricio's work also speaks to this: with the passing of time, a different us is recalling things from a different perspective.

Looking at Patricio's incandescent artistry, I realized the deepest Saudade is the yearning for that beautiful pure essence we were born with, the one we lost through self abandonment, the one we can get back if we have the courage to strip off the layers of labels. Underneath the various self definitions is a beautiful essence as unique as Patricio's photographs.

The exhibition is going on through July 8 at PointB Gallery
71 North 7th St., Williamsburgh, Brooklyn

Directions: take L train to Beford Ave. Short walk to gallery from train station.

PointB is a fascinating group of art galleries/living spaces where artists around the world live and work on the kind of art they hope will raise human consciousness and create a harmonious, peaceful, evolved world. They exist all over the world.