In 1969, Mario Cravo Neto left the patriarchal and syncretic city of Salvador for a cosmopolitan and impersonal New York, where he enrolled in a school of arts (the Art Students League). At the time, conceptual strategies were trending, leading artists to a type of serial experimentation that would become recurrent in their latter work. Photography, as a tool for quickly registering the world, is permeated at the same time by the subjectivity of one’s gaze. Therefore, it combines information and experience. Photographs of cars, of the subway and the series of deformations show that displacement and anonymity were a trademark of the metropolis. A city where everyone moves around rushing to appointments, in veiled expectation for the unexpected. Cravo Neto’s watercolors, sculptures and colored photographs are evidences of the development of a plural artist.
—L.C.O.