𝑭𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒄𝒂 π‘·π’‚π’π’Žπ’‚ 𝑻𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒏

While we watch, something sees us

The truth of the visible is an illusion. Its discredit has been progressive, from the moment that the β€œeye is no longer the one that preaches a Β«real world»”. Sight, which has always been considered the noblest of the senses, is usually powerless when it comes to perceiving the universe that unfolds before it. Appearances confined to visuality are responsible for the ambiguities that expand before vision. The gaze, in its audacity and autonomy, envelops us in cyclical traps, in its attempt to string together what is presumed to be real. This is known by Francesca Palma (1997), who in her personal ramblings lurks in those nooks where the prominent faults that hinder perceptive clairvoyance are installed. By exploring such abysses, she takes their fallible condition to relocate them in her paintings, retaining her feigned obstinacy. This is how the forms adopted resist being easily revealed.

In her landscapes she condenses the visual illusions that the images extracted from the infinity of the screens confer on us, incorporating elements that invite them to be found. The factors that stand out and are discriminated against are understood as β€œfractions of the real”, to use Palma’s expression. They are erratic versions, distanced representations of reality. The image, in its successive translations, transcends formats and dimensions, and throughout this process, perceived reality, the photographic image, the digital image and the painted image, can be glimpsed, generating a fracture in the traditional landscape genre. These resulting fragments are skillfully included as blind spots in the painting, leaving them suspended through lettering and embossing. This assemblage of languages, through which the materials and the invoice converse with the painting, activates and involves dialogues with the configurations of seeing in its optical unconsciousness.

In the paintings, sighted appearances are used, those hesitating and wavering, as Derrida understands it when she uses the terms β€œvisible in-visible”; that which, without being β€œin sight”, remains in the β€œorder of the visible”. That is, what is not reached by the trajectory of the gaze and is reduced to imperceptible moments. For the gaze, in its path, by discriminating the optical information, drowns out the visual forms that may be impregnated and filled with events. The insufficiency of sight in the face of blindness to the visible is a recurring symptom in our inhabited space, the one in which we exist with haste and agitation. The representations of the landscape that err on the real, in the sense in which Palma has detected it, constitute the evidence of the defects of human vision. When we can’t see everything within our visual range, we can only be wary of the deceptive nature of images and profane vision. For this reason, we can say with Merleau-Ponty that to see is to have distance. That is to say, to take the vision to its last power to cover the volume of the surrounding world. And it is possible to maintain with Foucault that “visibility is a trap”.

Beyond the spectrum or the entity, on the threshold of the visible, there are elements that sometimes remain hidden from the eye. These visual fragments, which move as if they were ghosts under dynamics of absence and presence, are materials that eclipse vision. There is always more than what we see, and what we see is not all there is. Not being able to trust our own eyes, which do not see everything visible, we can only assume what is presented to us through a suspicious and cautious gaze.

Ariana Tigua Montenegro (Ecuador,1996)

September, 2023