27th April - 29 december 2019
Annabel Aoun Blanco is a young visual artist photographer/videographer who works on the interstice between life and death, remembering and forgetting, appearance/disappearance, black and white, solid and liquid, etc. She tackles this extremely distinct subject in an original and unique way, based on back and forth dynamics. She reveals a fundamental concept in her work: the ‘loop’! The artist creates arrangements combining gestures, materials and the human figure. The materials used to render her research visually comprehensible have a symbolic role and are expressed in consecutive series: water, milk, plaster, sand, ash and coal. A practice of coded gestures operates on the matter like a ritual, leaving an area of freedom where it is randomly expresses. It thereby becomes the foundation that enables the human figure to be revealed and exposed. The artist considers the analysis and illustration of the Platonist idea ‘time is a moving image of motionless eternity’ where ‘moving image’ refers to video and ‘motionless eternity’ to photography. The living models become masks then imprints. The human figure turns into little more than an image in which any attempt at representation, object of seduction by the model or the artist, provides scope for the act of representing. The subject becomes the focus of metaphysical analysis. The artist seeks to add to the characteristics of photography those of ‘speed’ and ‘distance’ specific to video, and to video those of ‘fixed’, ‘instant’ and confinement specific to photography. The project is therefore comprehensive (photographs and videos) involving similar spheres between the two mediums, with the same combinations of materials, gestures and representations. The reality of a space (spatial and temporal) demonstrates a back and forth dynamic between two points, life (appearance) and death (disappearance).
This dynamic introduces the concept of ‘loop’; life is in death as death is in life with a transition between the two. The aim is to make this interstice between life and death visually tangible by using the mediums of photography and video. A particularly rigorous and coherent reflection produces very emotional works of a more than disturbing aesthetic quality. They call upon an intimacy between the viewer and these ‘portraits’ that speak of eternity.
