Curated by Bárbara Golubick
Fuera de Foco is a sector of solo projects that is thoroughly committed to the exploration of the different procedures, languages and materials especially enabled by the photographic medium’s unique qualities. With the aim of making the work of new generations of artists visible, Fuera de Foco invites four galleries to each present an individual, an installation and an experimental proposal, and combines them to promote a space open for cross-disciplinary dialogue that generates new aesthetic experiences and enriches understanding of the art form.
Around the Image
Invent environments, compose them, recover them, inhabit them. The photographs of Gonzalo Maggi (Intemperie, Córdoba / Buenos Aires), Paulina Scheitlin (Subsuelo, Rosario) and Evi Tártari (Fulana, Tucumán) create detention areas, spaces of permanence, walkable surfaces. They do not lend themselves like flow-images, descaled to the pressure to circulate, to continue from one image to another, but rather they ask for a delayed and deliberate look, attentive to the peculiar relationship established by the image and what surrounds it.
The architectural enclaves, the open geographies, the disputed territories, the urban spaces that we see deployed operate less as scenarios than as true environments. The specific coordinates (Tucumán, Rosario, Buenos Aires) offer not so much recognizable information and immediate identification; but instead evocation, an opportunity to think about the implications of what it means to inhabit, about the way in which environments interact with life, and about the power to affect their sites and their stories. This intervention, of a conceptual nature, is developed from a set of decisions that draw a common horizon. Maggi's brutalist quotation, Scheitlin's flâneur gestures, the archival rescue pulse of Tártari coincide in disorganizing vision, to make the hierarchies between planes indistinguishable, to stress the scales of its components, to put the notions of background and figure in parentheses, building worlds that eloquently emit signals that must be captured.
With various formats and inscriptions in genealogies and varied poetics, the three artists produce not only situated photographs, but also photographic situations. The works, in addition to giving an account of a complex notion of landscape and self-portrait, construct artifacts sensitive to the marks of their production conditions, they turn to show the traces of the enunciation in the visual statement. Either through the meticulous composition of the shot, through the projection of one's own shadow or through the oblique appearance of the photograph, there is a clear decision to make the viewer's presence visible in the form of the spectrum. The end result is a climatic game between place and presence, between landscape and shadow, between land and participation, a game from which the intuition emerges that one could stay around that image for a long time.