“Upon entering men in landscape and landscape in men the eternal life of Galicia was created,” reads a quote by Alfonso Daniel Rodriguéz Castelão at the start of Lois Patiño’s film Costa da Morte (or “Coast of Death”).
"Two major discoveries of this year’s Views are the Spanish Lois Patiño and the Portuguese Sandro Aguilar," said ArtForum magazine talking at the New York Film Festival.
"Facing each image what we should
ask is how it looks (us), how
it thinks (us) and how it touches (us), at the same time"
Georges Didi-Huberman
Let’s gaze at the image until we establish an instant connection. There it is, in that, when the image takes a glance at us. The punctum, the essential detail defined by Barthes, “shoots out of [the photograph] like an arrow and pierces me”. The image moves all through the path we had drawn invisibly, aerial until she reaches us. The image becomes the reflection and the mirror.
Videos and video installations with pictures make up this Exhibition. This lets us to consider the act of contemplation from the dialectic moment-duration. Henri Bergson is the reference for us. He is much applied when defining time, external time which extends through space in contact with the material. Inner Time or consciousness, which is measured by the intensity of the lived experience: the durée, is linked here to contemplation and intimate experience. Noticing the image’s breath: the silence that comes from inside the image.
In every video work, landscape, or picture, we will try to show them in an extraordinary and unexplained way. We will preserve the amazement, keep alert, and build a bridge of connection with the world. Heraclitus said if you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail. The fine movements of the landscape or the small gestures of the face are referred to as the secret key to decrypt. The man is seen in the landscape as hugeness, where the intimate expands into the distance. Its face as an Other: strangeness in his eyes. There will be video installations in which the face reverberates in a game of mirrors, reflections, and transparencies, where identity is diluted in presences that vanish.
In photographs, we analyze their temporal strata. Sedimentation of the Image that in videos will acquire its natural flow. Works where we explore the poetic image, seeking a dialogue with the pictorial and where we reflect on the time and stillness. I am also interested in being aware of the invisible path traveled by the image in its flight until it lifts you as a spectator: a dual trip glance. "Light as a contact action" in the words of Merleau-Ponty. The image, intangible as light, takes shape. I am interested in the weightless flow image in the lightning instantly: feel its vibration, its echo.
"Knowing how to look at an image would be, somehow, being able to distinguish there where the image burns, there where its eventual beauty reserve a place for a "secret sign" (...) There where the ash hasn´t cooled"
Georges Didi-Huberman
