Paulo Catrica chooses to confront the post modern condition. He calls is series  ìParks and Open Spacesî, as if carrying out an objective survey. His other subject, however, is contemporary living; and he too takes the liberal point of view. We know from contemporary photography that current building styles are bland and dehumanizing, and Paulo Catrica acknowledges this outlook. Many of the pictures have the kind of tinted look which comes from some ink jet printing. The virtue of this look is that it suggest cosmetics. The buildings seen from the outside are delicately toned and thin skinned, immaterial in the post modern sense. Their insides too dissolves into beautiful atmospheres. Form and structure disappear or survive notionally. Space exists, of course, but mainly as part of a wider tabulation: the master plan is elsewhere, as numbered parking spaces indicate to perfection in one picture of an industrial zone ( an example of what in English is called appropriately enough ëlight industryí). Thomas Struth dealt somewhat with this business of the calibrated and enumerated world in his pictures of Japanese streets festooned with wires, pointers to elsewhere and to all sorts of cable systems. Struth actually showed these environments weighed down by this kind of apparatus which had its own materiality. Paulo Catricaís version opts for dematerialisation; the connecting points have been disguised in effortless scenarios. In one instance a bridge of office space sweeps virtually unsupported across a kind of table-top arrangement which might have been devised in a studio. 
Catricaís tactic is introduce enough of the human to make the search worthwhile. Those who use the screens under the luminous ceilings have physical requirements: a furtive ashtray says, as does a bottle of water , and opened and piled reference books point to the elusiveness of information. Catrica admits contingency. This may be thoroughly planned environment but it is also one in which events take place and leave their residues. To some degree it is a forensic photography because each blueprint carries a scattering of signs which point either to what went before or to what might happen in future.

A stream edges its way through the perfected scene hinting at some waterborne catastrophe in the years ahead. Notebooks, pictures and the ubiquitous litter on work surfaces all announce human inadequacy and its consequences.
Gursky and others in the Dusseldorf School all took pictures of such sites, but they always had a formula in mind. Their work spaces were notably systematic so that the very idea of difference could be registered. Catrica is more prudent and reserved, so that one is not quite sure what in particular he wants us to remark on. Thus an element of uncertainty and questioning, which once again defines this as markedly liberal aesthetic. Catricaís are also carefully made images, finely gauged and arranged, and this too is worth a remark. It is an aesthetic attitude which you find in Atget, in Evans and in Basilico, and in any number of others you care to recall. Careful construction of this kind of meaning. It asks you to pick your way through the scene, to differentiate with care and to enumerate. It elicits counting: how many screens, parking spaces, windows, columns, work spaces. Counting in this context is ritualistic and/or consoling. Counting has a rhythm and we also count towards a conclusion (eg. 825, 826, 827, 828 amongst those light industrial buildings ). Counting circumscribes the scene and helps us to forget about all centres on infinity reduced to a screen, almost incorporated into the structure. His vision here is of infinity as just another element in a calibrated complex.
Think of all these pictures in religious terms. Religion answers to our worries about oblivion, and one figure for oblivion is infinity, which Catrica manages in his fine poetic image to contain as one rectangular motif amongst many.

Ian Jeffrey
in ìAntitheticalsî January 2005.