Four visual offerings
The arteBA Foundation again opens Sala10 in the Centro Cultural Recoleta (Recoleta Cultural Center) housing the show “Post-Fotografías – La desrealidad de la imagen” (Post-photographs – The irreality of the image), under the curatorship of Claudia Laudanno.
Faithful to the idea of giving a space to new artistic tendencies, the arteBA Foundation has selected photographs for a show articulated around four different visual offerings.
Rosalía Maguid, Eduardo Arauz, Andrea Racciatti and Elisa Strada have created photo-installations specially intended for this room and will be exhibited from November 4th till December 12, 2004.
Sala10 Committee
Image snipers
Allegories for an expanding view
The photographic art practised during the last twenty years in the West is undergoing a ceaseless review of its representational rules. Consequently, the positivist photographic language, documentary based, i.e. the tout court photography, orthodox, based on the verisimilitude of the analogue image, as a testimony of reality, has been questioned, mainly in regards to maintaining the purity of the primary referent. Therefore, the visual analogon, i.e. the record, or the direct shot, is no longer a mode of knowledge, true knowledge of the real, but it becomes an image of synthesis, a simulation mark, and very often a hyper-simulacrum.
In the wide field of experimental contemporary art there becomes evident the passage from the early, inaugural positivist photography to what today is known as “post-photography”. In fact, in this operation of aesthetic un-delimitation, the photographic language appears expressly modified, adulterated and overflowing, either because of the contrivance and the beautifying of the photoshop process or due to the consecutive manual interventions that, to a great extent, are being carried out by an important number of multimedia artists within the virtual universe of cyberspace, or through the artisanal manipulation of the negative, retarding the developing process, increasing the visual textures, using strident chromatisms and contrasting effects of high visual impact.
This process of “making an image out of an image”, starting from a first language-object, that is always the negative, leads to a décalage of the traditional codes of positivist photographic art generating a wide, attractive range of travestism, camouflage and hybridization with other languages associated to today’s art.
The main purpose of the present thematic collective show is to establish links between the artificial fictions and the virtual ones, which go through the recent procedures of late-modern photography and “post-photography”. Apart from this, the way the four photo-installations are exhibited is based on a combination logic capable of pertinently integrating all the poetics in play.
Beyond the real
The photo-installations of Rosalía Maguid, Eduardo Arauz, Andrea Racciatti and Elisa Strada are topographically specific, which means that they have been created in accordance with the physical and architectural features of the space that houses them.
In the first place, Rosalía Maguid offers a set of post-images, phantasmagorias of spectral visions, with pieces belonging to her unseen Serie Negra (Black Series). These are digital prints on a flexible, rubber-like support. The various modules that compose the photo-installation of Maguid are made up of such textiles, stretched across frames of different shapes, to make the spatial location of the multiple work more dynamic. The first crossing over the expected limits of the “fleeting instant medium” can be detected in this type of opus, in which the pieces seem to be photo-paintings, when, actually, they are not, and at the same time they reach an increasing objectuality, because the material in which Maguid’s nocturnes are printed is definitely utilitarian and extra-artistic. Then one must ask: Is the contemporary photographic sign moving against the stream? The artist deliberately changes the direct shot and the naturalistic image transforming them in extreme phenomena. Her machine-like figurations transform details, panoramic views and ominous landscapes into elegiac vedutas, negative-like, of irresistible and corrosive beauty.
Eduardo Arauz created for this occasion a sort of photographic mural with a narrative strain, divided into big and middle sized modules. These modules contain a series of volumetric objects made of acrylic of bright colors, displayed against a dark grey background with stripes and streaks. This long installation is displayed horizontally as one continuous line that would admit no breaks or interruptions. The dynamic and spatial causality of the fictional device utilized by Arauz highlights the illusionism of the non-real components of perception, by means of various visual plays. Here photography is time and also speed and motion, anchored in the mute life of the object. Objects of deceit, which like gigantic effigies, arouse sensual illusion. In the works of Arauz the strategy of illusion is not to oppose reality but to enhance it, to invest it with a much shrewder, refined pleasure for the eye. The solitary objects thus float in an ambiguous abyss, acting like marks or traces of the disappearance of everything else.
Then, Andrea Racciatti plays between two poles, swinging between the mechanical reproduction of the image and the digital post-production of it, provided with a series of photographs in a sequence in which the infantile model adopts different postures in front of the lens. In this sense, for Racciatti the pose is an attempt to read and re-interpret the analogical image, which captures different performing instances, making unexpected use of the portrait with the aim of enhancing the mediation of identity, in the nomad territory of the digitalized image. In the vertical modules “Ascenso” (Ascent) and “Descenso” (Descent) the rising, stepping movement gives more power to the image while the falling curve expanding from inertia remains stuck as an indication of the lack of gravity, and the vertigo of the sight. Her works offer an authentic “phenomenology of slow photography” based on sweeps, vague, nebulous atmospheres, amidst a celestial and bucolic nature. Racciatti’s works are paradoxical configurations which efface the color of reality present in the earlier analogical photographs. Thus they promote the effect of suspension and displacement of the original representation. As a counterpoint, the artist introduces a series of much smaller modules with “intimate portraits” that concentrate all the discursive effectiveness of the image.
Finally, Elisa Strada exhibits a set of photographs on expanded field containing long, landscape formatted bands of shocking tones in which the moving images tell us about the developing action of time, which inexorably flees to produce electric explosions and shocks between shapeless or streaked forms, far-out iconical configurations and extremely intense colors. Strada injects a dose of reversibility in her images ad infinitum, in which the primeval turmoil is inscribed in agreements of transparencies, which expand as light effects flashing all over the elongated surfaces of her photographs. En these artificial urban scenes, everything is about to fall immediately, returning to the terrific and exciting chaos of catastrophe and fragmentation. Strada’s photo-installation starts from a centralized set, very similar to the strips of a Venetian blind, with an almost monochromatic and hyper-saturated proposal, brightly polished, which emphasizes the artificial nature of the image. To this is added a tryptic composed of modules of different sizes containing fragments of zebra crossings, in yellow and black.
Ir-realizing the photographic image
A simulacrum as such does not copy anything. Nor does it feign it. Its operation consists in devouring all reality, replacing its original traces with images of synthesis, clonations and twinning devices. This hyper-reality, contrived from de-multiplied figures, seduces, lures and fascinates us, by virtue of its strangeness and self-referentiality. The connection and harmony between the four post-photography installations here exhibited are the result of well-tempered practices which put visual signs to work through metonymy. This means the fall of metaphor, of substitution, of verticality to give way to a set of allegoric and narrative strategies. In each of them, the images displace, overlap, interpose, extrapolate each other. Thus, the works of Maguid, Arauz, Racciatti and Strada make evident the progressive loss of the real, not by default, but by excess of the same reality. It is just in this emptiness, in this hiatus, where their hyper-simulations are situated. In this respect, post-photography is the place for simulation by accumulation, intended to filter and dress up the recording of the real so that it may disappear in its own prosaic material evidence.
Claudia Laudanno
Eduardo Arauz
Rosalía Maguid
Andrea Racciatti
Elisa Strada