Abstraction

2016

I have often wondered what the term abstract means in photography, a medium whose laws maintain an inseparable connection to the Real. I think it indicates the abstraction from the river of time, an immobile and suspended temporal fragment: an infinite, absolute present time. Nevertheless, the photographic medium is capable of indicating an abstract vision of the Real, as it alludes to non-retinal interpretations of the visible, super-perceptible forms, mental images that find their symbolic recognition in the Real.

The Horizons are scriptures of light self-generated during the process of loading the camera with film, beyond the consciousness and will of the photographer. They are perceptible manifestations of light inscribed on the photosensitive surface, before it records the first image taken by the photographer: they are images prior to time in latent form, already active before the encounter with the gaze and the experience of the photographer.

Every Horizon is a scrap of the photographic process, the initial segment of the film developed together with the entire strip of sensitive material, to reveal all the exposed images: its 36 true photographs.
This is an “off camera” process that happens “in camera”: a paradox that produces pre-photographic images, directly inscribed by light.

With the term Horizon I indicate the result of an act of appropriation; those films are not mine; my authorship lies in the recognition and attribution of meaning to the photographic object, not in the shot. My object is not the world but the language, the code of the visible world. I am interested in the latency and revelation of the image, its perceptible manifestation, the possibility of an apparition and the icon that arises from the intimate relationship among light, time and matter: the chance that occurs.

In my view, the Horizons are the last “true” photographs of the XX century. Everything has been photographed, Google tells us that the entire skin of the visible has been mapped, just as the whole chain of DNA has been written and encoded. Scientists say that only 4% of existing matter is visible and thus, I infer, can also be photographed, while the remaining 96% is classified in part as Dark Matter and in part with the even more enigmatic term of Dark Energy. These terms seem to imply a reality that exists but is not evident to media based on the use of light, and perhaps not even susceptible to representation through analytical thinking.

If the Horizons are the ultimate photographs of what visibly exists, its summation and reduction to the roots of language offer a more “objective” image of it, in which the object and the image of the object coincide, generating a model of reality that is the limit between light and its absence, between material and language. Language and subject seem to no longer require an object outside of themselves through which to establish a dialogue: it is the language that speaks (to us).

These works represent a borderline between photographic objectivity and abstraction, where the latter term doesn’t indicate a non-referential image, but pure interpretation of light revealed by photographic means. My will comes into play in the choice of how much white (excess of information) and how much black (absence of information) to include in the image, the positioning of the threshold: the line that separates the light from its absence, the latency from its manifestation and, ultimately, the power from the act.

The Horizon indicates the -here and now- while alluding to a possible elsewhere. Every Horizon is a genesis of light in time, a present here that alludes to a possible elsewhere. The Horizon is a visible threshold, the real and immaterial place that unites what it separates; I represent photographically a process of experience and transition: all life is a continuous crossing of thresholds.