In his first solo exhibition in an institutional context in Lisbon city, André Príncipe presented Elephant at MAAT. The artist continued his exploration of the photographic medium as a mechanism to perceive, capture and construct the reality, gathering a set of unpublished photographic works and a video installation specifically designed for this exhibition.

Working from his photographic archive, André Príncipe (n. 1976) selects and edits the images to create dialectical connections and relationships of varying harmony in search of a meaning that is rarely narrative.

In a process somewhat akin to the language of cinema, André Príncipe evokes the documentary condition of photography while simultaneously recalling its inevitable fictional condition. His work reflects an interest in artistic traditions as models of representation, especially in painting, and reaffirms his concern with the themes of life and death, space and time, permanence and ephemerality, poetry and politics, and rise and fall.