Luminescences
Solo Show
2011
Text by:
Sandra Pinardi
When trying to describe the contemporary world, some theoretical discourses have proposed to define it as a term –also a concept- that’s a bit paradoxical: a world or a liquid reality. A liquid world in which the foundation of reality has shifted from entities to relationships, from materiality to connections, from objects to networks, from propositions to communication, and has become dynamic and provisional. It has been built solely as a force for transformation and movement. Sharing the same adaptable virtues as water by being able to ascribe to any form without resistance and continuously in circulation. The idea of liquid refers us to a way of being that is, on the one hand, flow, oscillation, vibration and displacement, and on the other hand, ambiguity, indeterminacy and vagueness. This way of being defines our cities with transiting passages of exchanging images that make up the environment, and within it we coexist with a space made up of insubstantial manifestations: intangible presences, ephemeral records, ever-changing landscapes, always forthcoming.
Elizabeth Cemborain's photographs record, document and explore that liquid mode of contemporary existence, they do so from their emblematic formulas: the immense advertising screens that not only illuminate and color the streets through which we walk, but also become monuments and symbols of our understanding of the world, of our expectations and desires. It registers the incessant and elusive flow of the light, in the abundance of its chromatic diversity, and from the conjunction of a double movement, a reiterated and inscribed displacement of screens and their fleeting series of images while gliding down streets and avenues. What the artist registered - the captured images - account for how our places - the spaces that surround us and in which we live - have been idealized, turned into grids, into fugitive beams of chromatic lines, into light trails and grooves. For this reason, in these images our world is revealed in its relational and connective materiality, in its condition of appearance, by highlighting the fundamentally apparent, insubstantial, shallow surface that determines and distinguishes it.
Those rays of light that become grids are also imposed as an affirmation of a mainly aesthetic complexion, not only because it is embedded in the image and its strategies, but also because it’s always elusive, uncertain and excessive. An aesthetic nature that within its light (that which makes it visible) highlights its essential principle, for that very reason, it’s presented as trace and as a remainder, as trace and vestige, because light is impossible to stop or contain, it is what has already happened, it is the highest expression of variability: an element that is purely dynamic. Photographs and videos of this communicational moment of reality, link together the materials in which existence occurs: a world of devices and serialities, cities of images and brightness, instances in transit and constant modification.
An aesthetic complexion that connects and relates the images of Elizabeth Cemborain with the strongest tradition of our modern art, kineticism. Within this unique utopian moment of art, phenomena were synthesized in rational and regular figures, it is its pursuit to appropriate movement in its various forms and functions, art was intended to cover the spaces with its imaginal force and its uncertainty.
Sandra Pinardi
2011
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