cefvigo gallery

UNDER THE BLACK SUN (1991-1993)
Under the Black Sun is based on the rudimentary and ”exquisite” technique of the street photographer, who takes the pictures with a camera directly on photographic paper (which is not only a way of saving material, but also a way of seeing the results at the moment). The photographer develops the exposed paper inside the camera with the help of developer and fixer that he keeps in empty tuna fish tins. When he takes out the paper negative and dries it in the hot sun, he applies a layer of Mercurochrome on the face of the person photographed. Then he takes another picture of that negative on paper with the red retouch through the camera itself, getting with this, after the same developing process, a positive, or the common photograph for the identity card.
The innocent touch-up is intended to whiten the complexion of the photographed subject, achieving this way not just a racial but also an aesthetic, economic and even cultural improvement; all this on the belief that a white person inherently represents all these qualities.

In Under the Black Sun I attempt to question these beliefs leaving the process half way, in negative, when the photographed person is wearing the red veil over his/her face. This same project keeps analysing the mysteries of the portrait; the face, what it may or may not tell us, what it represents; with the take of new images, also in negative but presented in large format, experimenting with opposites, between shadows and lights which seem to emerge from the inside, with the details that a face like a mask can hide or reveal, with eyes that look like a path towards the inside, some of the portraits masked with the great red veil.

THE LAST THINGS. 1996
‘The Last Things’ is one of the three projects, together with ‘Dog-eared Pages’ and ‘The Lost Steps’ which have in common the ‘public archives’ and their cataloguing of objects with an implicit and questioning importance.
The triptych ‘The Last Things’ was taken in a room that was used as the archive of the hospital Larco Herrera, a mental asylum which had seen better times. It is a piece related to the body, to its fragility and decay. A leather ball used to relax muscles, a floating straitjacket and some rusty trays used in surgery.

THE LOST STEPS (1996)
‘The Lost Steps’ are images of objects found in the archive of the corpus delicti of the Palace of Justice of Lima, Peru. They are objects presented in trials as incriminating evidence in misdemeanours, crimes of passion, murders and terrorist acts. Innocent objects with an enormous potential of violence, which witnessed extreme human situations.

THE DISAPPEARED ONES.1998
The triptych ‘The Disappeared Ones’ tries to speak of those thousands of people that can’t be tracked down, a problem existing not only in Latin America but all around the world. Apart from a possible political interpretation, the basic/poetic idea of the fragility of the human being is also present.

CENSORED. 2000
Continuing with the mystery of the contents and function of the archives I took pictures of the ‘blank’ pages of the population books of San Marino, blank due to the constant migration of the 18th century and the hope of returning. The blank represents the vacuum and the absence of these people, who, in opposition, are present.
‘Censored’ follows the same search as in ‘Blank’. They are pages of books photographed in the archive of Salamanca University, graphic and abstract images, with almost passional gestures of the censorship during the Spanish Inquisition.

SHARPCUTTING. 2000
‘Sharpcutting’ starts from the idea of the silence of the so-called steel weapons, of the contrast between the possible uses of the object and the thin line between good and evil.

ARMORED. 2000
This project, made in Mexico, portrays in almost a conventional way -3/4 pictures- the trucks that carry objects coveted by most of our society and which have to be carried in armored, bulletproof, bombproof vehicles, with infrared lights, with anti-puncture tyres, with specialised communication equipment, with routes followed by satellite and with armed and qualified staff.

UNTITLED (Tortures). 2000
Specifically made for Vigovisións, it is focused on two tryptiches in which the objects suggest their violent use and the story that is hidden behind each of them.
The small format and black and white tryptich was made in Peru. The objects photographed here come from torture cases: a wooden mallet, a bloody shirt and a rifle. The large format and colour tryptich, of which two images are reproduced here, is made up of objects from the Museo Etnográfico Liste of Vigo: the skin of an animal, a cane used for beating the hands of the children who did not obey in school and a brush of nails, making an ‘imaginary or real’ parallelism of its possible uses.

NEWBORN. 2001
‘Newborn’ explores the vision of a human being during the first three days of his/her life. After carrying out a research with books and specialists, the first visions of a baby were interpreted and translated into photographs taking into account their vision angle, the focal distance, the chromatic range, the colours.
Considering that a baby continues to develop his vision and does not ‘see’ like an adult until he is eight months old, there are several vision mechanisms through which they observe the objects thoroughly, perceiving different degrees of light and darkness, experimenting new sensations and the first visual responses. This interpretation of the way a newborn baby sees its new world may also be a symbolic representation of the beginning of our vision and of the significance that those first visions, sensations, may represent later, in the life of a new human being.

UNTITLED (VOMIT). 2002
‘Untitled’ (Vomit) are pieces of abstract reference where, thanks to the format and photographic representation, there is an aesthetic effect of the object just to, paradoxically, refer us to the represented and its meaning, replacing that first impression and creating a disturbing effect.

BLEUS. 2003
‘Bleus’ is a series of abstract images where it is difficult to distinguish what it’s represented, one can hardly recognize a bluish or purple blotch on a beige/pinkish background. Only through the title – bleus, the French word for bruises- one can find out that the small format photographs are bruises on the skin.
In ‘Bleus’ there is a reversal of the represented. The painful trace is photographically transformed into a landscape of subtle and sensual colours, opposing perceptions.

Milagros de la Torre