ART ‘ Pluton : Traces of the Other Side by Rose Marie Barrientos.

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By Rose Marie BARRIENTOS

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Archeological evidence in the shape of animals painted in a cave suggests that seeing the world was never enough, we also felt compelled to represent it. Our desire to capture our environment through the image has found multiple expressions throughout history; many means have been employed to that end. Images allow us to reinstate reality, to re-present it as it appears to our eyes at a given moment, or to show it as we wish it were. The captured image thus appears as a tool for understanding, interpreting, and translating or conveying reality, which explains perhaps that it awakens the interest of both the aesthetic and the political thought. The complexity of this double anchoring might have been exacerbated with the invention of photography, a more immediate means of apprehending the world, which also renders its images more realistic. A latecomer among our reality-capturing devices, photography has had the greatest success, nonetheless. With the advent of the smartphone camera, taking pictures is a daily ritual whose long-term impact in our perception of the world remains to be assessed. Conceived in a laboratory after years of research, photography was born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century[1], child of an inventor and an artist who, haunted by the prowess of the camera obscura, dabbled in physics and chemistry until they achieved an update. A cohort of enthusiasts quickly developed improvements on the initial idea and by 1888 cameras could be purchased by the general public. In simple terms, a photographic image is the result of a chemical process that when associated to the properties of light – a principle central to physics – transforms a latent image into a visible one. During the photographic processing or development, the image is rendered insensitive to light, becoming therefore a permanent print. Images of the world could thus be immortalized. In his project L’autre rive, Emeric Lhuisset obliterates this principle by modifying the chemical process so that instead of remaining fixed, the image disappears progressively when exposed to the light. There is a reason for this: with the image gone, other realities come alive.