Diálogos con la energía y la luz
Monday, 26 May 2014 21:09
Written by Jeannette Betancourt
Hyperreality and its uncertain condition
Images play a key role in composing the individual and collective memory. They simultaneously configure our cognitive and emotional universe as spatial-temporalities contained in heterogeneous cultural matrixes, in which they acquire meaning. As these values are transferred, they cause epistemological changes that lend new direction to our endeavors and knowledge.
In the mere nine years of the 21st century, the photographic image has risen up and been sublimated through new technologies, becoming a polycentric structure in which the imagination of our time is constructed. The speed with which it links the system of legitimation, of conceptual, philosophical and anthropological notions and references, have made it an ideal means of generating and transmitting contemporary knowledge and culture, which is distinctly Utopian and virtual.
The photographic work by Verónica Cuervo (Mexico City, 1958-) is immersed in this visual context, which is vertiginous, overabundant and replaces reality with the immense. In these images the symbolic has been suppressed, the real absorbed and the social reformulated under a polyvalent system. Stripped of all references, as everything that existed at the time as the photograph was taken has collapsed, the only option is to boldly face the summit reached by these images in transition.
Reflecting the imaginary of our current existence, Cuervo’s photographs have a destabilizing effect, as rather than contemplate they represent a hyperreality that shifts the viewer from conviction into deeply uncertain territory. This reality appears diffuse and indeterminate, portraying the centrifugal impulse of a spatial-temporality that spreads out in various directions.
Many people would find it irresistible to carry out a retinal reading that evokes feelings solely concerned with sight: disappearances, apparitions and spectral transformations. These journeys have no beginning or end, and only that which is between them is clear. The attempt to integrate these images into a code subject to reason provokes unease, vertigo and many more illusions than they explicitly contain, as they operate from a contemporaneity that cannot be grasped, operating at a speed beyond the logic of dromology.
This series of images constitutes a visual reflection within an aesthetic free of the material, in which there is neither territory, city nor body, but only a progression, a continuous and timeless event depicting ambiguity and its dissolutions and creating impossible scenarios.
Reflecting a critical thought and gaze on the world that she inhabits, Cuervo’s photographic work deconstructs reality once and for all to give way to the discontinuous tension of the instant.
Hyperreality and its uncertain condition
Images play a key role in composing the individual and collective memory. They simultaneously configure our cognitive and emotional universe as spatial-temporalities contained in heterogeneous cultural matrixes, in which they acquire meaning. As these values are transferred, they cause epistemological changes that lend new direction to our endeavors and knowledge.
In the mere nine years of the 21st century, the photographic image has risen up and been sublimated through new technologies, becoming a polycentric structure in which the imagination of our time is constructed. The speed with which it links the system of legitimation, of conceptual, philosophical and anthropological notions and references, have made it an ideal means of generating and transmitting contemporary knowledge and culture, which is distinctly Utopian and virtual.
The photographic work by Verónica Cuervo (Mexico City, 1958-) is immersed in this visual context, which is vertiginous, overabundant and replaces reality with the immense. In these images the symbolic has been suppressed, the real absorbed and the social reformulated under a polyvalent system. Stripped of all references, as everything that existed at the time as the photograph was taken has collapsed, the only option is to boldly face the summit reached by these images in transition.
Reflecting the imaginary of our current existence, Cuervo’s photographs have a destabilizing effect, as rather than contemplate they represent a hyperreality that shifts the viewer from conviction into deeply uncertain territory. This reality appears diffuse and indeterminate, portraying the centrifugal impulse of a spatial-temporality that spreads out in various directions.
Many people would find it irresistible to carry out a retinal reading that evokes feelings solely concerned with sight: disappearances, apparitions and spectral transformations. These journeys have no beginning or end, and only that which is between them is clear. The attempt to integrate these images into a code subject to reason provokes unease, vertigo and many more illusions than they explicitly contain, as they operate from a contemporaneity that cannot be grasped, operating at a speed beyond the logic of dromology.
This series of images constitutes a visual reflection within an aesthetic free of the material, in which there is neither territory, city nor body, but only a progression, a continuous and timeless event depicting ambiguity and its dissolutions and creating impossible scenarios.
Reflecting a critical thought and gaze on the world that she inhabits, Cuervo’s photographic work deconstructs reality once and for all to give way to the discontinuous tension of the instant.