HIKARI (luz, light).

Between 2015 and 2017, Pedro Medeiros lived in Kyoto. From the outset, his objective was not just to take photographs in Japan or build up a portfolio of this experience, but rather to produce an oeuvre, using black and white as the aesthetic language. Starting from a reflection on daily life, his work is not limited to an (authorized) observation of the public sphere, with its choreography of gestures and normative framework, but has always sought to penetrate a more intimate space – the uncanny or even forbidden – where the inferred image hidden beneath the surface is sometimes as meaningful as what is actually visible. At a second moment, more than the traditional ambiguity between the documental and fictional aspects of photography, these pictures also reveal a subtle ironic communication between the exhibited work and the observer’s gaze. Without compromising the importance of image sequencing and the vertigo invoked by the speed of contemporary Japan, which is presented unobstructed by taboos or impediments, we also encounter here a long deep gaze, which lingers with precision on themes as complex as memory and the place of heritage, human loneliness, and the transformations provoked by technology, recorded in a style that acquires another dimension, centring on millennial Japan and its most symbolic daily rituals. These photographs reveal a dialogue between space and time, sometimes superimposed in the same image, a perception that alerts us to the fact that the past and present coexist there, apparently contravening the flow of time… But might not this also be one of the most seductive attractions of Japan?