Bank of Brazil Cultural Center (CCBB), Rio de Janeiro: 22 January to 25 April 1999. The exhibition, organized by the Bank of Brazil Cultural Center, under curator Ligia Canongia, showed photographs by Arthur Omar during the 1973-1998 period. With fragments gathered from street carnivals in Rio de Janeiro between 1973 and 1996, the artist makes portraits that isolate the faces from this context, making them dream pictures, wrenched from the normal time frame and taken to some limbo, in the chinks and gaps of time. Floating, they hover strangely and disturbingly. These rapturous faces are fluid, liquid, no longer of this world, belonging to another sphere, outside time, in suspension. At a frozen mysterious instant, they transcend the face that materializes them towards energy - pure release. The inauguration of the exhibition also included the launching of the book O zen e a arte gloriosa da fotografia [Zen and the glorious art of photography) and the video Infinito contínuo - histórias de fotografia [Infinite continuum - stories of photography]. A roundtable was also held with the participation of Agnaldo Farias, Arthur Omar and Paulo Herkenhoff. In a talk given in December 1999 at the Eva Klabin Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, the artist spoke clearly and enthusiastically of his process of making art, emphasizing that he always regards himself as a romantic artist. He explained that his work begins with the face, the anonymous face, resulting from an established empathy, the artist's wish to merge into the other through ecstasy, empathy that makes the camera click. In the laboratory, the pictures of those frozen moments are worked by hand, by which the subject is given potential, imposed on mechanical reproduction. By non-conforming to contemporary time, with speed and this instant reality, the picture is transformed in a unique work of art. Along the path of romantic tradition, he brings the subject to the center of art creation and resumes the subjectiveness as the primordial truth of the artist, bringing to the fore a historic process so well-known to us, bound to the expressionist questions and our baroque heritage. The artist will only know the result of this process at the end. It doesn't really matter where it goes. The formal result is part of the context and the artist has just achieved it, but his long journey is constantly underway. If, as the artist says, the rapturous feelings are those situated in a line beyond the normal - such as drunkenness, fascination, passion, commotion, raving or frenzy - he captures, going the opposite way to the photographer's work, the image stretching this time, this moment, and it is precisely there where the ecstasy, of which so much is said, happens - during the process of doing, in the artist's ravings and his own rapture before the act of creation. Filmmaker, video-maker, photographer, artist, writer and musician, Arthur Omar participated in the 1998 São Paulo Biennial and, that same year, was nominated for the Estadão Multicultural Prize in the Creators category. The world's uneasiness, and its mystery are impregnated in Arthur Omar's work, first and foremost an artist. It is hard to be indifferent before these pictures, anonymous souls oozing subjectiveness. They are both a remarkable and indefinable presence because, when seeking an identity in those faces, self-recognition, only impossibilities are to be found, that cannot be captured completely. They are always flowing, insubstantial rhythms. States of being, delirious, transgressors -states of rapture!