La Voz de Galicia – 15 de abril, 2022 →
I think it’s been almost ten years since I began to hear her name, and from that moment I was hooked on her work, not just for its significance at an artistic level but also for its meaning at a social level. The work of the Brazilian photographer residing in Madrid Angélica Daas was in between art and social responsibility, and her way of achieving it connected with all possible audiences.
I followed her career, especially the journey of her project Humanæ, a fascinating work of reflection and documentation about diversity through skin color. And each time that the project smashed a new ceiling or arrived at another historical place, I was as happy for her as if we had known each other forever because there is something incredibly familiar in her way of telling us what matters, something that makes her curiosity our own.
In Humanæ, Angélica Daas achieves precisely that, it makes appreciating difference feel familiar in order to be able to celebrate the beauty of what we are, showing us diversity through the «inescapable singularity of human beings.» And she does it through a beautiful process that also turned into a powerful educational tool because in her collection of photographs of people, «each portrait’s background is tinted with the identical color of a sample of 11×11 pixels taken from the nose of the subject and matched with the Pantone® industrial palette» and so defied stereotypes related with skin color and showed an infinite diversity.
She says that Humanæ «is a kind of game to question our codes» and it makes one think that reflecting about inherited narratives should be a mandatory game for everyone…