Todo fue negro
Rosa García, 2021-2023.
34 b/w photographs, Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, variable dimensions.
Exhibited from November 11, 2023, to February 11, 2024, at the Sala Specularis of the Huete Photography Museum, Fundación Antonio Pérez.
Exhibition poster.
Three photographs from the series Diálogos (2021-2023).
Todo fue negro (2023) sequence.
First photograph from the La desaparición (2023) sequence.
In an era in which human impact on the environment has become a first-order geological factor, in which the awe-inspiring landscapes once exalted by Romantic painting under the category of the “sublime” now suffer and reveal themselves before the deranged force of a voracious present, and in which the great value systems that once organized our understanding of the world have dissolved into the flood of dazzling images emitted by mass media, the natural and the artificial, the animal and the human, and the unavoidable physical limits of a pastoral walk in the countryside have become conflated into a delirious ensemble of perceptions, as unsettling as it is unprecedented.
During various journeys through different places, and sometimes even through the body, the simulated fragments of an absent reality can reveal their extravagance—especially when subjected to the perpetual distortion of the photographic camera, or to the violent process of aestheticizing memory imposed by the innocent editing programs on our digital images. After all, they may end up being a faithful reproduction of the disconcerting.
This is the case with Diálogos (2021–2023), a series of photographs whose fragmented nature reinforces this notion of disconcertion tied to the immediate. Across a prolonged succession or overlap of temporalities and spaces, the strange gives way to the sinister, creating a suffocating atmosphere that harasses the viewer under the disturbing, hallucinatory forms of the ghostly. Everything could vanish in an instant, the result of the dark breath that extinguishes the horizon in the sequence giving its title to this exhibition, Todo fue negro (2023). The body itself would yield to nothingness under the influence of a blinding artificial light, as in La desaparición (2023). We lived in suspense, subjected to the capricious influence of a radiant, imaginary veil, and then, everything went black.
Exhibition review by Ana Martínez-Collado: https://www.m-arteyculturavisual.com/2024/04/03/detenidos-en-el-preambulo/
Catalog texts: Ana Martínez-Collado, Rosa García, Francisco Holgado and Andrés Garo.
Design and layout: Andy López.
ISBN: 978-84-16463-98-5