cefvigo gallery
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
Shadows to Pierce the Street
Dejo mi sombra,
una afilada aguja que hiere la calle.
Sebastián Salazar Bondy
Who can doubt that Plato, with his metaphor of the cave of shadows, was really thinking of a darkroom, and that the inhabitants, who delighted in dim images, preferring them to the harsh daylight of truth, were photographers?
Out of the cave poured a cascade of images, representations, semblances. For only in a dark place, not in daylight, could the mystery of light be witnessed and sight renewed. Leave it to others to interpret the shadows, to distinguish reality from “ illusion." The dwellers in the cave of shadows are content to negotiate treaties between light and dark, which may be abrogated in an instant or may last for eternity. That's not their concern. And when someone challenges them to show how the world really looks, they say, "You know how the world looks. I can show you only how the world looks seen ...
In Graciela's cave, watching the shadows materialize, I sense the presence of other troglodytes, those first spectators of their own surprise, as she puts it. There is Nicephore Niepce, whose silver plate was like Michelangelo's stone, full of shapes and figures waiting to be released. Also Henry Fox-Talbot, who delighted in the tiny images from his "mousetrap" camera, a camera no larger than a mouse. Was that how the world looked to a mouse, or how the world would look if we were mice? Neither. It was how the world would look photographed, if we were mice.
Above all, there is Etienne-Jules Marey, who made the first images of a bird in flight. Divine tinkerer: he invented highspeed photography, designed rubber arteries to carry blood, tried to build an airplane before the Wright brothers. His "chronophotography" murdered time in order to resurrect it, carved it up into visual instants, only to attempt a reassemblage. Had he succeeded, he would have made the first motion picture. From fragments of time, he sough to produce the most difficult illusion: continuity.
Although she has called her method heliography, after Niepce, it is Marey whom Graciela Sacco resembles. Not so much in her technical curiosity but in her sense of photography's inherent paradoxes. She retrieves inert images from the amnesiac eternity of yesterday's newspapers and sets them in motion on suitcases (EI emigrante: EI secreto), or revives their force by placing them in the beam of a flashlight (Un lugar bajo el sol). It is a force they never possessed on the printed page because the force springs from a recognition that light and image emerge together, from a necessary surrounding darkness, and with them vision and conscience. More recently, she has brought the used~up images to life, transforming them with plexiglass into a complicated play of shadows, a play that includes the spectator as a protagonist (Sombras del Sur y del Norte). It comes as no surprise that in the current exhibition Graciela has incorporated video into the play of images. Seeking the boundary between the discrete and the continuous image, between two states of visual experience, she has produced a hybrid. This pushing at the limits of the image, forcing perceptual and metaphysical disclosures, reminds me of Marey.
But Graciela is a poet, not a scientist, and her project is to poeticize the world, not to dissect or enlighten it. When she appropriates and repositions her anonymous images " wings, mouths, people walking, standing in line, pointing guns, throwing stones" the intervention darkens and complicates all of reality. That is, it takes the meanings of things that had been so clear as to be invisible and makes them uncertain, ambiguous, suggestive, open. In the same instant, they become newly visible and enigmatic. Is a wall with eyes still a wall? Is a doorway with wings still just a doorway? Is it a protest or an affirmation? Is it something we look at and pass by or a summons to action? Her juxtapositions are never so arbitrary that they can be ignored, never so obvious that they die into literalness. She brings the darkness of the cave into the daylight world, shadows to pierce the street, in Bondy's words. Think of the Spanish verb "asombrar" to darken and to astonish. This is her form of insurgency. She does not present a point of view, she unsettles the sense of sight. She does not offer a program, she renews possibilities.
Lyie Rexer Brooklyn,
New York