HENRIQUE MATOS: FRAMING THE UNSEEN
@HenriqueMatos
Henrique Matos, a director and photographer born in Lisbon in 1996, has spent the past decade quietly reshaping how we perceive the spaces around us. With a background in philosophy and a current Master’s focus on film and the intersection of arts and sciences, Matos brings a cerebral edge to his visual practice. His work resists easy categorization, oscillating between urban landscapes, human subjects and pastoral scenes, yet always returning to a central impulse: to transform non-places into art.
"I really like shooting in urban environments, and I love endowing those environments with some twist that makes their photographic record unique: a new perspective, a new framing, a new color palette, something that isn’t how we normally perceive the locations but still carries over some latent aesthetic impression of how those locations are, perhaps something closer to a distillation of how we feel them. I love the idea of transforming non-places into art, and I suppose that’s what I’ve tried to do the most in the past decade of practicing photography.’’ - Matos explains.
This instinct first surfaced in 2015, during a family trip to Sintra’s Parque da Liberdade. A modest Japanese garden tucked behind a pavilion became the site of an unexpected revelation. Armed with a Sony Xperia U, Matos spent twenty minutes photographing the space - and not just capturing it but composing it. “Maybe for the first time in my life, I wasn’t shooting images by simply placing whatever subject I wanted to shoot within the frame,” he recalls, drawing a moment that marked a shift from casual documentation to deliberate creation. “Looking back ten years later, those pictures at the garden obviously turned out pretty amateur-ish by any serious standards, but it’s impossible not to value the moment of artistic self-discovery they provided me with. Is it a little bit embarrassing to admit that you hadn't seriously thought about framing until you were 18, maybe? Absolutely, but hey, better late than never, right?”
@HenriqueMatos
@HenriqueMatos
@HenriqueMatos
Since then, Matos has cultivated a body of work that reflects both his philosophical training and his intuitive eye. His early exhibit Um Fio Condutor (2017–2018) explored rural Portuguese streets as a unified visual thread, while Mantodea (2018), a short film about a couple’s tribulations in Lisbon, found its way to international festivals in Bucharest and the Azores. In Rede (2021), he introduced physical cables that extruded from images of power lines and radar dishes, creating a tactile connection between viewer and subject. Each project reveals a fascination with form, distortion and the expressive qualities of overlooked environments.
His 2022 exhibit, Compilação Digital de Sonhos e Pesadelos, marked a conceptual leap. By blending new photographs, found images and uncanny AI-generated elements, Matos constructed a visual language for the stochastic nature of dreams and nightmares. The result was a disquieting yet compelling meditation on memory, perception and the digital uncanny. It’s a testament to his willingness to experiment, both with medium and with meaning.
Despite the conceptual depth of his work, Matos insists that the most rewarding part of the creative process is intuitive. Whether it’s finding the perfect composition on location or adjusting an RGB curve in post-production, he lives for the moment when everything “clicks.” That instinctual satisfaction, he says, is what keeps him returning to photography and film. “It feels like the mediums just penetrated their way into my life and I felt compelled to work within them.”
His upcoming exhibit, PN – In Memoriam (2025), will center on the final photographs taken in a demolished building within Lisbon’s Faculty of Letters - a poignant return to the institution where his journey began. It’s a fitting tribute to the spaces that shaped him and a continuation of his effort to preserve and reframe the overlooked.
For Matos, success is not measured by acclaim but by resonance. “If my images can prime someone to perceive the world in a slightly different way, even if only for a few moments, then I think I can consider myself artistically fulfilled.” In a practice shaped by instinct, philosophy and quiet transformation, Henrique Matos continues to frame the unseen and invite us to look again.
Follow Henrique’s work on Instagram at @henrimatos1996 and stay tuned for future features of Creative Intersect at @thecreativeintersect.
