MÖBIUS a sensory contemplation

Luis González Palma
Reflections on recent work - Artist’s Statements

From 2013 begins a series in which Luis González Palma delves into other ways of creating and understanding photography. Through the dialogue between abstract painting and his portraits charged with intense emotion and a strong lyrical character, he creates new symbolic meanings, new arguments and possibilities and visual associations between both forms of artistic representation, between the emotional and the reason, painting and photography, allowing ambiguous works and new stories, both aesthetic and political.

In this series the artist also explores other ways of expressing and creating images, including:

COLLAGES - inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon recreates portraits by subjecting them to an elaborate work of overlapping cuts, mutilations, assembly and reorganization of the parts that will compose these faces, deformed, wounded and rearranged with red threads on a delicate rice paper.

ANAMORPHOSIS-CATHOPTICS - interactive play between the distorted flat image projected in a curved mirror is reconfigured. In LGP’s work this reconfiguration is not possible, it gives rise to a new abstract, hybrid and partial image, between stitched pieces and red threads we never managed to reconstruct it in its entirety. It induces the viewer to a perceptual sharpening in the unreachable search for a logical image.

FELTS - He again approaches a sculptural dimension of photography in his pieces of impressions on felts. We find them held up to the wall by a fragile glass with geometric designs attached to it, displayed on shelves rolled with red threads that slide through the felt and drop, or as large totems attached to space in a tangle of threads.

"INVISIBLE PALPABLES"

In this project LGP breaks into what he would call "lyrical abstraction", creates uncertain and charged images of a mysterious geography, through abstraction represents a reality related to the void and the sacred in a space of introspection of the author.

HESIQUÍAS: This work is made from archive photos of the Center for Regional Research in Mesoamerica (CIRMA) in Antigua Guatemala. He takes portraits made by the Guatemalan-Japanese photographer Juan José de Jesús Yas and creates new images that represent meditative visual spaces, interpreting the idea of emptiness and time in a metaphysical sense. Through the act of elimination, the cracked and abstract surfaces of Hesichias are ghost portraits, "empty" made by digitally eliminating the subjects (religious colonial figures) leaving visible the random irregularities of the history of the photos as objects permeable to the environment and people with whom they have had contact.

KOAN: The artist reinterprets astronomical photographs taken by the Astronomical Observatory of Córdoba, Argentina. Explore and reflect on the notion of infinity and the search for an origin. This series is divided into three parts: ASTROFOTOGRAFÍA - collages with photographs of comets, the moon and solar eclipses in print on translucent onion paper. SPECTRA -making abstract images from spectral lines, printed on rice paper. COSMIC DUST - geometric drawings based on cosmic ray frames.

HAIKUS: Haikus is a series of digital geometric drawings on fragments or residues of other images. It has a clear relationship with the Möbius project, but in this case it establishes a dialogue between geometric abstraction and expressionist abstraction, giving rise to new images with particular geography and visual sensations.

MUSICA CALLADA: In this work, Silent Music 2018 - Sunspots, the Artist used moonlight to print sunspot images from NASA archives. In a second part of this project he draws these same stains on fragile tree leaves. Works such as these remain upon the gaze; and make reference to the human vision of the universe as well as our connection with it.

AUDIO | VIDEO WORKS

UN TIMPANO INFINITO– ATLAS (listening to the stars)
Music has resurfaced as a theme. In collaboration with the astronomer Armando Mudrik, the Library of the Astronomical Observatory of Cordoba and the musician and artist Sebastian Szyd creates a musical work from the register of the stars seen from the City of Cusco on the day of the winter solstice, extracted from the Atlas of the Cordoba Durchmusterug. Together they transcribed the star map into a roll of musical paper, the holes of which can be reproduced by a small music box device to make "the sound of the stars" audible.

“WHAT WE LISTEN BEFORE THE WINDOW”
It is another sound project that the artist has made in collaboration with Sebastian Szyd. In it they transfer the photographic experience to the sound field: they capture the sounds made by the camera at the moment of taking a photograph and deliver them in a sonorous landscape where the sense of hearing prevails over visual.

LOS HUESOS DEL AGUA | THE BONES OF WATER
The short film loop, Los Huesos del Agua | The Bones of Water, by famed Guatemalan Artist is mesmerizing and meditative, soft and introspective. We contemplate the sense of presence as we watch the hand of the artist trace the shadow of leafy branches falling across the drawing pad on his lap. The rhythm of the wind in the trees becomes a dance marked in pencil. The sense of longing generated by this process is palpable and draws us in. We remain transfixed by the inability to translate or even to grasp a moment in reality, yet feel connected to the continuum.

MONOGRAPHS:

Poems of Sorrow (Arena Editions, New Mexico, USA)

The Silence of the Gaze (Peliti Associati, Roma, Italy)

Luis González Palma, Ediciones La Fábrica, España

Tu/Mi Placer in collaboration with Graciela De Oliveira, Editorial Documenta/Escénicas, Córdoba, Argentina