This visual investigation should be understood as a method of self-knowledge, based on the idea that the closer we get to the Other, the closer we are to ourselves. In that sense the photographs, videos and sculptures presented here should be approached as though they were mirrors.
Under the title Self-Negation, this show puts into practice something I regard as central in my work – the measurement of the distance that separates us from the Other. My intention is to articulate a language within which we may re-think that distance, that span ever more defined by technology.
When I came out of the coma I was in following a car accident, I opened my eyes and saw my visitors on the far side of the glass partition of the intensive care unit. From then on my work has been scrutinizing the space between artist and spectator, between transmission and reception. My principal and profoundest aim is to reduce the artistic object to the very same thickness as that of the glass wall in that hospital. I believe that in so far as we can shrink the artistic object, so too do we shrink the distance between us. The oneiric dimension of the images I am presenting on this ocasión – like amplified photographic negatives – contributes to this reductionist intent. Their aesthetic alludes to the prior moment of all images; the intuition that precedes all language.
Such an exercise prompts us to think about our common languages/commonplaces, through the signs here emerging from the recollection of urban sites; mutant architectures encountered as we go about our daily business which bring back both the memory of our own lived experience, and the inseparable traces of collective historical memory.
I have entwined the threads of personal experience and shared cultural reference. By using images plucked from everyday itineraries through the city, I am deploying a practice of containment of signs that inoculates the images with a germ of self-annihilation. This has to do with the paradoxical meanings they enclose: the images assert themselves precisely as powerfully as they negate themselves.
The logic of these works is subject to a dialectical mechanism designed to foster a critical analysis of the spaces we share, as also of the cultural and socio-political environments we belong to and which condition the construction of our identities. Each image contains multiple instant stories, micro-tales that spring from the dialectical relationships established within it among the elements and referents it comprises: collisions that open out toward the spectator.