Vincent Catala. Île Brésil

Vincent Catala’s photographs do not align with the conventional, or even official, representations of Brazil. The bright stereotypes of joy, rhythm, exoticism, prosperity or, conversely, poverty that surround these narratives overlook the face of the country that the artist presents in his images. And therein lies their power.

Île Brésil is the result of a long-term project. The decisive moment here is a slow and elaborate construction that is intimately intertwined with the life of the photographer, who has lived in Brazil for fifteen years. Over the last ten years, he has patiently examined the three main environments where he has put down roots. The first is located in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, a suburb far removed from the images usually associated with Rio. The second takes place in Greater São Paulo, the vast circular outskirts of Latin America’s largest city.

The third is set in Brasília (and its hinterland), a capital that is by definition both miniature and peripheral. By photographing the ‘infra-ordinary’ of a world that has now become his own, Vincent Catala takes us into the anonymous fringes of Brazil’s three main cities. Tirelessly traversed on foot, by motorbike or by bus, these territories—neither destitute nor wealthy, vast and sparsely populated—are spaces found throughout Brazil, though they are never shown. In these places without borders or centres, the sense of isolation is not merely geographical, but also subjective, mental. The metaphor of insularity seems ever-present. One feels a sense of waiting, perhaps of inevitability. Like a moment frozen in time before the imminent eruption. What is it all about?

Vincent Catala does not seek to answer this question, although he raises it in his photographs. In a powerful essay he has written on Île Brésil, the Brazilian writer João Paulo Cuenca offers an explanation. “In a country that has not undergone its revolution and refuses to definitively consign its history of slavery and ethnocide to the past, progress is an illusion, rights are not guaranteed, and despair never erupts. The inhabitants are like prisoners of a perpetual present, with no awareness of the past nor any vision of a truly new future.”

Moving between rigorous photographic protocols and instinctive wanderings, Vincent Catala captures the ambiguity of a country-continent where light both illuminates and obscures. The territories he traverses, like complementary pieces of a single jigsaw puzzle, convey the project’s extended sense of time and its complexity.

An audiovisual installation, combining sound and moving images, extends and expands the visual world depicted by the artist. 

Vincent Catala incorporates photography, text, video and sound installation into his practice. A member of the VU’ agency from 2014 to 2026, he has recently returned to France after living and working in Brazil for fifteen years.
In both his commissioned work and his personal practice, he explores the relationship between the individual and their environment, capturing their subjective representations: solitude, resilience, freedom... With a sensitivity to long-term approaches, he focuses
on specific territories— s that are both highly defined yet complex— which reveal a particular view of the world, and where the idea of universality plays out through encounters and a given geography. Thus, the anonymous margins of a Brazil torn between a sense of inevitability fuelled by ancient atavisms and a deep desire for change. This research takes the form of a long-term project entitled Île Brésil, which he is developing from 2013 to 2023 in the three peripheral regions where he lives and works successively: the western zone of Rio de Janeiro, then Greater São Paulo, and finally the Federal District (Brasília and its satellite towns).
Regularly published (M Le magazine du Monde, Télérama, Fisheye, Revista ZUM), his work has been the subject of various exhibitions in Paris, Amman, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Tbilisi, Braga and Cadaqués. In 2015, it was acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ). At the 2017 edition of Paris Photo, Galerie VU’ presented part of his work on Brazil. The Moreira Salles Institute (IMS/SP) did the same two years later in São Paulo. Dunes Editions is dedicating a monograph to the Île Brésil series in October 2025.

With the support of the French Embassy in Belgium and the Institut français. As part of EXTRA, a program that supports French contemporary creation in Belgium.