Um/um
One/one
The image shows two male torsos, printed on suspended acrylic sheets, with a small passage between them. Thus situated, and under the effect of mirroring, the bodies function as each other’s negative. However, each image is not just the mirror or negative of the other, but complementary. Only the observer’s gaze, however, can unite the two images and imagine the unity that would result from this complementary sum.
The geometric cut – a circle, which is made on the hairs of these bodies, harks back to the idea of ‘order’ underlying our constructive past, and attempts to imprint a regular figure on a chaotic environment. At the same time, the geometry of the cut makes these concrete bodies strange beings, throwing them into poetic and abstract territory. This duplicity – negative/positive, concrete/abstract, left/right – is practiced in such a way as to be self-suppressing at the very moment it is installed, as viewers merge the images in their imagination by quickly shifting their gaze through the passage between the blades. It’s as if each ‘hole’ in the body corresponds to an eye of the spectator, and the ‘vision’ only occurs with the immediate and irreversible union of these two eyes, or these two holes.
Ligia Canongia
