Iñaki Bonillas
16 Sep - 05 Nov 2010
IÑAKI BONILLAS
“Historias de fantasmas de un anticuario”
September 16 - November 5, 2010
—What is a ghost?, Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.
James Joyce
Roland Barthes wrote “Every photograph is a certificate of presence,” what we see “has been absolutely and irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.” It is there and it is not there at the same time; or it is there but submerged in its own image. “After the object comes the image,” observed Maurice Blanchot. “The thing was there, caught in the vital moment where it was going somewhere, but the instant it turned into image it became ungraspable, no longer our contemporary.” It has become the presence of an absence or, in other words, the appearance of something that is no longer there: “the return of what does not come back.” This same idea can be applied to one person when photographed. The person looks fully himself/herself, and yet it is not him/her. It is his/her own image: a ghost or even a cadaver of a sort, because it is “neither the same person as the one who was alive, nor another,” and not even another thing. It is not wrong, then, to think of Photography as a sort of cemetery where every shot is a small funerary monument, where the story of that has been is told.
For his new exhibition at ProjecteSD, Iñaki Bonillas uses the title of the celebrated M.R. James book, Ghost stories of an antiquary to present three “ghost stories”: three studies around the (non)persistence of the image and its spectral nature, and a reflection of the photographic through some of the ideas developed by Barthes and Blanchot.
The first work, Los ojos (The Eyes), is composed of twelve etchings of portrait photographs taken from the JR Plaza archive. In all of them, the person photographed refuses to look into the camera, appearing with the eyes closed. The series refers to the old concern generated by the likeliness of photography that made early observers think of people portrayed as actually alive, and able to “see”. But this concern may be increased when the portrayed person rejects what he/she has in common with the “alive”: the look. The distance, insurmountable, between us and that person, the ghost plunged beyond the image is thus stressed. The portrayed person does not see us but neither do we: he/she has escaped behind his/her eyes. The spectral quality of this series is even more emphasized by the fact that it is presented as negative images, being the photographic negative as described by poet Robert Desnos: “the true specter, the only capable of roaming from photograph to photograph.”
Tineidae, Latin term given to the family of “clothes moths”, is a work resulting after exposing a group of JR Plaza pictures to the action of these insects. According to the dictionary definition, the term moth “may be applied to anything that destroys something slowly and instinctively” such as, for instance, time does. Blanchot said that the image becomes the follower of the object: “what comes after it, what remains of it and allows us to have it still available to us when nothing is left of it.” However, the photographic image is not eternal. “But even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal,” as Barthes reminds us: “like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages. Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away”. This temporary condition of photography, perishable, links it to the fragile condition of the human memory, especially when photography is used to replace the original memory of an event.
The third series of work shown is a reflection on the relationship between History, the other territory by excellence of ghosts, and Photography. Historical positivist memory has used the effect of reality offered by photography to give the illusion of proximity and transparency of the events of the past. We all grew up with the idea that the past, as Barthes said, “is as certain as the present”, and that “what we see on paper is as reliable as what we touch.” Our text books are just that: family albums. And yet, there is no better proof that the testimony of photography is as fugitive as the oral, than the empty pages of an album of collectible pictures which will never be filled out; than a history which will never be told because it is that of a country which no longer exists. Displayed on tables, the series Checoslovaquia presents, in silkscreened images, the pages of an old album published in the extinct country. The singularity of it resides in the fact that the spaces meant to be used to paste in the pictures are left as they were found: blank. Only the texts found on the pages have been altered. Bonillas has given them an order, or rather, a universal disorder, the alphabetical, for everyone to read or see on these voids his own history.
“Historias de fantasmas de un anticuario”
September 16 - November 5, 2010
—What is a ghost?, Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.
James Joyce
Roland Barthes wrote “Every photograph is a certificate of presence,” what we see “has been absolutely and irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.” It is there and it is not there at the same time; or it is there but submerged in its own image. “After the object comes the image,” observed Maurice Blanchot. “The thing was there, caught in the vital moment where it was going somewhere, but the instant it turned into image it became ungraspable, no longer our contemporary.” It has become the presence of an absence or, in other words, the appearance of something that is no longer there: “the return of what does not come back.” This same idea can be applied to one person when photographed. The person looks fully himself/herself, and yet it is not him/her. It is his/her own image: a ghost or even a cadaver of a sort, because it is “neither the same person as the one who was alive, nor another,” and not even another thing. It is not wrong, then, to think of Photography as a sort of cemetery where every shot is a small funerary monument, where the story of that has been is told.
For his new exhibition at ProjecteSD, Iñaki Bonillas uses the title of the celebrated M.R. James book, Ghost stories of an antiquary to present three “ghost stories”: three studies around the (non)persistence of the image and its spectral nature, and a reflection of the photographic through some of the ideas developed by Barthes and Blanchot.
The first work, Los ojos (The Eyes), is composed of twelve etchings of portrait photographs taken from the JR Plaza archive. In all of them, the person photographed refuses to look into the camera, appearing with the eyes closed. The series refers to the old concern generated by the likeliness of photography that made early observers think of people portrayed as actually alive, and able to “see”. But this concern may be increased when the portrayed person rejects what he/she has in common with the “alive”: the look. The distance, insurmountable, between us and that person, the ghost plunged beyond the image is thus stressed. The portrayed person does not see us but neither do we: he/she has escaped behind his/her eyes. The spectral quality of this series is even more emphasized by the fact that it is presented as negative images, being the photographic negative as described by poet Robert Desnos: “the true specter, the only capable of roaming from photograph to photograph.”
Tineidae, Latin term given to the family of “clothes moths”, is a work resulting after exposing a group of JR Plaza pictures to the action of these insects. According to the dictionary definition, the term moth “may be applied to anything that destroys something slowly and instinctively” such as, for instance, time does. Blanchot said that the image becomes the follower of the object: “what comes after it, what remains of it and allows us to have it still available to us when nothing is left of it.” However, the photographic image is not eternal. “But even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal,” as Barthes reminds us: “like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages. Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away”. This temporary condition of photography, perishable, links it to the fragile condition of the human memory, especially when photography is used to replace the original memory of an event.
The third series of work shown is a reflection on the relationship between History, the other territory by excellence of ghosts, and Photography. Historical positivist memory has used the effect of reality offered by photography to give the illusion of proximity and transparency of the events of the past. We all grew up with the idea that the past, as Barthes said, “is as certain as the present”, and that “what we see on paper is as reliable as what we touch.” Our text books are just that: family albums. And yet, there is no better proof that the testimony of photography is as fugitive as the oral, than the empty pages of an album of collectible pictures which will never be filled out; than a history which will never be told because it is that of a country which no longer exists. Displayed on tables, the series Checoslovaquia presents, in silkscreened images, the pages of an old album published in the extinct country. The singularity of it resides in the fact that the spaces meant to be used to paste in the pictures are left as they were found: blank. Only the texts found on the pages have been altered. Bonillas has given them an order, or rather, a universal disorder, the alphabetical, for everyone to read or see on these voids his own history.