Quimera: Daniela Ângelo

By engaging with an object in a haptic way, I come to the surface of myself. 

Laura U. Marks^[1]

Daniela Ângelo’s photographic images have always contained a latent sculptural dimension. Previously described as “sculptural bodies imprinted on the bidimensional emulsion of celluloid”^[2], the artist’s images capture artefacts, creatures and living organisms, giving them a new body and shape through careful composition and direct intervention upon the materiality of film. In doing so, Ângelo’s images open up the most uncanny passages beyond the confines of photographic realism, favouring distortions, fantasmatic and animistic forms that call upon viewers to wonder and dwell in the eerie. 

In Quimera, Ângelo’s images fully become installation, exploring corporeality in new and manifold ways. Like in previous works, the images in the exhibition have been intervened upon by the artist, through photographing book pages, double exposures, color filters and light reflections. These images possess a distinctly haptic quality^[3], conveying all the tactile interventions behind their fabrication, and offering viewers textures, overlays, reflections, blurs that suggest that images are also corporeal entities, as living matter in contact with light, objects, camera, and human bodies. 

Installed on a steel rack (commonly used to transport glass frames), Ângelo’s images in Quimera take on a new body that stages and choreographs. Both imposing and enticing, this installative body invites viewers to move around in the space of the gallery, circumnavigating these image-bodies to step into a sensory exchange between the viewing body and the corporeal images. Despite the commanding scale of the steel structure and the large prints on display, there is also an intimacy that the installation elicits through the sensual movement of bodies circling around it and the gradual encounter with the images it calls forth.

This encounter with the image-body, between commanding and intimate, is kindled by the absorbing, alluring images on display. The photograph that gives the exhibition its title, installed on the front side of the steel structure, features an enigmatic chimeric figure, half parrot, half cat, crafted by the artist through double exposure of two calendars that have left their traces on the image. 

In order to reach this image, viewers entering the gallery first encounter a print of a leaf, so suggestively haptic in how the light touches the leaf’s texture. The smaller scale of this print draws the viewer close, to then enter into a full-body engagement with the larger print of the chimeric parrot-cat. When circling around the structure, viewers encounter a captivating photograph of a blooming flower, from a page of a book by Japanese photographer Arākii, touched by light reflections that almost burn the image. Rather than seeing the images all at once, the viewer steps into an installation that works like a slow unveiling. This multisensorial choreography is never prescriptive but invites a kind of exploring and lingering from various directions as the visitor moves about in the gallery space.

Quimera represents a significant shift from the artist’s previous exhibition displays. While her images have always questioned the optical primacy of our sensorium and the accepted visual regimes that structure attention and knowledge, Quimera explores the hapticity of images and viewership, how viewers see with their whole bodies, and how their senses are engaged and drawn into images that too have a body of their own. 

Daniela Agostinho

November 2025

[1] Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Duke University Press, 2000, p. 184. 

[2] Bernardo José de Souza, “Babuíno Talismã de Daniela Ângelo”, Galeria da Boavista, 2024. Translation mine. 

[3] Laura Marks defines haptic visuality as “the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies”. In moving images, according to Marks, haptic visuality is often conveyed by depicting people experiencing sensations (smelling, tasting, touching) and camera work along surfaces of objects or close to skin. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, University of Minnesota Press, 2022, p. 2.