Collected
short stories names an exhibition and a book. Daniel Blaufuks has
always used both means of presenting work a lot: during the last 13
years he has had sixteen individual exhibitions and written 13
catalogue books.
To suggest a
story with two images is in fact to use the shortest model of
sequential suggestion. In these ten small stories, their potential
environment is provided by the relationship that is established
between the first and second images based on: space and personality,
gaze and perspective, analogical geometric rhythms of the sections of
image, interior and exterior in the city, partial view and pan,
transparency and colour, textile and body, dark and artificial
lighting.
To these
tensions are added a few recurrences: the very focussed lighting of
objects or parts of people in dark contexts; the variation between
the instantaneous and the studied pose; the isolation of characters
in which a bodily or facial expression is underlined; the duality of
fixed places with its simultaneous quality of passage; black, white
and reddish tones; actions and waiting; a nostalgic wave associated
to the condition of travel; the pictorial value of that which could
be in our imprecise memory, clouds in the romantic painting, an
undone bed in the baroque painting, an out of focus woman in Richter,
or a swimming pool in Hopper is an intra-textual value that
interferes with the strong photographic value they also have.
The
mutilation (bleeding hand holding a razor, ceramic hand without one
of the fingers, fencing sword), the cloths (bed, sofa), the walls and
the glass, the sky (clouds, airplane, tower, atmosphere through the
windows or bars) cross the set beyond each story. Hidden behind
binoculars, the artist watches the places of his and our fictional
unrest.
At the top
of a ladder it is possible to reach the projection of a small story
on the pages of an open book: from within it, from a tea cup made to
shake by the hand that holds it, appears the sound made extensile to
the whole exhibition and to the synaesthesias in which the blur or
the effects of the passing of an airplane fit.
Leonor
Nazaré