blank
| A photograph is a bright disappearance; it is at the same time a full and an empty, a visual place of something that doesn’t have a place to be anymore. When we shoot a photography, we inscribe it in a time where we couldn’t attend; swallowed in the cavity of the device, that time comes back frozen. When someone has his picture taken, irremediably he is not there anymore. And neither are we: the surface of the photography continuously proposes to inhabit an unfeasible time. A photography seems to not surrender to the sole moment where it was possible to be, and continues to propose a date, an impossible one because it is set in an unconditional elsewhere. The act of looking at a photography is like a repeated date, that we keep on missing.The naked body of M. is a white hole, a bright cavity that opens a wound in the continuity of the black background; a crisis in the still and smooth surface. While we scan with the gaze this image, following its sharp outline, its precise details, while the eyes fill up with these features, it is like if everything that we don’t know about this image carries on collapsing in front of our eyes. The strangeness of this hole impossible to fill, unexpected and unforeseen, strips us of our capacity to make sense: a photography is nothing else that what it happens to be. The apparition of the unforeseen transforms us into seers, in the constant attempt to push the gaze to dive into something that is actually an impenetrable surface. Watching the luminescent body of M., this clash between the ongoing movement of the eyes and the attractive force of this blankness, of this blind and repelling breach, we fell the contrast between the sensation of being touched by something that never even touched us and the full strangeness of her presence.But the living strength of this photographic semblance, its absolute seriousness, takes its sense from the awareness that a photography is tied to the act that brought it to life. It’s an empirical image, the print of what happened. Too close to its referent, to whom as viewers we are referred “by a blind impulse”, the photography can’t access to a symbolic dimension and become a code: it falls into a preverbal condition. M’s pictures are reluctant to constitute themselves into a sure and coded aesthetic object. As active hosts of something wild, those pictures propose an aesthetic experience that must be researched not in a rise towards an iconic mystification, but instead in a decline towards the buzz of the visual track from which they came from. Blank (2016) Lambda print on Duratrans and lightbox, 42×30,5 cm, mounted on wooden frame 55×44 cm
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