Rachel Tanugi Ribas is a visual artist born, based in Brazil and educated in New York and France. Rachel is specialised in photography and is working with different printmaking techniques as transfer and photolithography. She is an artist who works obsessively with reflections and the different stories within one image that this resource allows to build and suggest. Because of this, the project conducted at ´ace was focused on exploring the concept of mirage, the idea of desire and illusion. The “fata morgana” effect is central in this body of work, a term that refers to an optical illusion produced under particular climatic conditions, such as temperature variation, in mountain valleys and oceans. The fata morgana effect is the illusion of seeing ships or islands as large shapes such as fairytales castles.

All of this has allowed Rachel to refer to other topics such as the intimacy of the feminine inside an urban context, the illusion implied in the constructed feminine figure.

Parallel to this research, Rachel had been taking pictures upon her arrival to Buenos Aires, from the air and inside the city. These photographs have been worked with the paper plate lithography technique which allows her to achieve different textures and atmospheres.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I have been using this technique since university, when I fell in love with printmaking in all its forms: woodcut, engraving in metal and photogravure made from my original drawings and photos. When searching for various processes of photo printing, I focused even more on this technique because it gave me a texture that I could never get through modern techniques such as Photoshop.

Each photograph inspires me to choose the texture of the definitive work: when we touch or look at an object’s surface, we feel if the skin is smooth, rough, soft, harsh or wavy. The texture is, therefore, a visual and tactile sensation.

The resulting prints have a crafty aspect that is for me very attractive.