Hotel Mermaid Club – Chris Rhodes

“Hotel Mermaid Club” is the debut work of British photographer Chris Rhodes; a true ode to the fragments of everyday life.  The author transfigures reality, shaping a poetic universe that flirts with nostalgia, with the feeling of melancholy.

Although portraiture, as traditionally understood, is not present, the book finds humanity in the narration of its traces; in the spaces we occupy and the objects we use on a daily basis, so ordinary as to escape even our attention. Fleeting moments are given a second chance for consideration, a chance to appreciate simple habits, imperfections or accidental aesthetics.

Contrasting colors, primary forms and delicate compositions coexist within the pages of the book, a book that is completed with a poem by Fernando Pessoa, in which he wonders about the universal tendency to attribute beauty to the ordinary, concluding that beauty is the name of something that does not exist but is given to things in exchange for the pleasure they give us and that, therefore, doesn’t mean anything.

A beleza é o nome de qualquier coisa que ñao existe
Que eu dou às coisas em troca do agrado que me dão.
Não significa nada.