Construction
2011
“Rita Lino’s photographs are just as hard and easy to swallow. These are snapshots that are frail and confrontational for the faint hearted while ballsy and empowering for those who celebrate life and grab it right by the you know where. Using carefully selected backdrops, props, pieces of clothing, jewelry and parts of her body she unveils in each and every single photograph her current state of mind. Rita Lino doesn’t have the need to tweet or status report her emotions. Her photographs are strictly and carefully posed, whether it be at her lover’s quarters, some remote park or simply in the middle of a public space. She quietly screams at the spectator to love, hug, look or fuck her. And, at times, she simply them also to go fuck themselves doing all of this by looking at her subjects dead cold in the eye.
If you have trouble dealing with one-to-one confrontation, I suggest you stop reading this and leave. In Construction, Rita presents a selection of her polaroids, a now rare and cult method of photography that is as scarce and sect like as showing true human emotions. Using a near pitch-dark space as her showcase area, the spectator is forced get disturbingly near her, telling me “they [the spectator] will have to get so close to each image that they will almost be able to smell me.” If realness had a scent, it would smell like Rita Lino.
” (Miguel Figueroa)