Daniel Monroy Cuevas

Espectador en el vacío

03.02.2015 - 25.04.2015

Espectador en el vacío -Spectator in the Void-
One of the most dramatic scenes in the movie "The day after tomorrow" is the image of an environmental catastrophe created by a freezing cyclone. This blast is seen by the astronauts from the International Space Station. These astronauts, who have been launched into space on a rocket, have the privilege and are tortured by the anguish of seeing how the Earth is being destroyed. When driven into the orbit, the Earth takes a real, although a rather abstract dimension: they know that all human beings are about to die in a cataclysm but at the same time they are completely oblivious to it. However, what they see is not a screen. It is the external reality of the Earth seen as an object and not as an image. They are spectators in the vacuum where the possibility of representation has been canceled.

In this exhibition, Daniel Monroy shows precisely a dual way of looking at images from two considerations. What happens when the images that could be gathered from a projection are canceled as images? The evident answer that can be found in his work is that this image is launched to another place and acquires a completely different perspective. A perspective with a dual nature: we perceive it as an object but also, there is evidence inside of it. Consequently, balls of different sizes made with electromagnetic tapes “Espectador en el vacío [Spectator in the vacuum]” contain a recording potential depending on the size of the ball and relative to the duration- extension of the tape. The image recorded in each tape is a white light obtained from the highest saturation of light of the camera. The image is canceled in the form of light and driven to the materiality of the ball as persistence in space. Yet, at the same time, the power of the recording of the light in the balls is transferred to the leds of the work “Espectador en el vacío (subtítulos) [Spectator in the vacuum (subtitles)]” as a light beam in the form of phrases from Guy Debord, Derek Jarman, Chris Marker and Isodore Isou that reflect on political-poetic possibilities and impossibilities of the production of images. In turn, all this is related to tape images obtained with a scanner “Trampa para miodesopsias 1-6 [Floaters trap 1-6]" in which the residue of an action is documented by the light of a machine converting the image of the tape in interiority as recording power but also as the exteriority of an image as a landscape.

The work of Monroy's is a mystery in the sense that this word expresses the occult. The mystery is not something that has not come to light but something that when coming to light as a phenomenon, keeps something hidden. Maybe it is like the feeling the astronauts have when looking at the Earth from space. They know they belong there, they see and recognize it. But at the same time they are no longer part of it.

- Daniel Montero