The pictorial models I work with are largely screen captures of old short films or animated series reproduced on digital platforms. The operation of fixing certain frames, taking them out of their time continuum, aims to produce static and decontextualised scenes, whose forms become strange, or which result in fragmentary and open actions, at the same time, hiding subtle elements of their original content. In this way, amiable characters, charged with symbolism and affection, become strange, diffuse and scattered forms, creating a tension between the displacement of the represented form and its potential transformation in its decoding.
The representation of this nebulous and ambiguous state of the image is a paradoxical exercise, as it forces the gaze to fix on forms that are not always recognisable at first sight, as the codes of representation oscillate between the figurative and the abstract. The fact that this almost spectral state of the degraded images allows only a vague recognition of the objects represented means that their reading can be displaced, that is to say, multiple forms can be projected from a single one.
The traces in the image - mismatches, sweeps, blurs - that result from capturing the fleeting action of these animated reproductions playfully allude to the photographic, the nostalgia of the moment captured and the objects eternally preserved in the image (Sontag, 2006). This nostalgic connotation is also expressed in the obsolescence of image technologies, where the pixelated is in constant danger of becoming an aesthetic value of the past.
The main theme I usually deal with in this series of paintings is the realistic pictorial representation of a diffuse imaginary, shaped by the degraded and undefined state of the image circumscribed on the screen. By this I mean blurred images, copies of an original that we cannot access and whose visual content is altered by low resolution or interference in its diffusion.
My particular interest in this imaginary is partly due to the ambivalence with which these images inhabit the space of the web; an ambivalence that is subject to their state of dematerialisation, since on the one hand, the reduction of the quality of the image (matter) challenges the official values promoted by digital technologies, such as high resolution, copyright, heritage and privatisation, among others. At the same time, however, by giving the image speed, such dematerialisation allows it to be seamlessly integrated into current semiotic modes of production, what Steyerl (2014) describes as 'an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation'.
Through the pictorial reworking of these degraded images, they are given the opportunity to circulate in a different surface and materiality, as well as a temporality that restores the possibility of being contemplated and thus acquiring other narratives.
Through these images, I am also interested in exploring the notion of indeterminacy, which is related to the visual category of the image (Didi-Huberman, 2010), a concept oriented towards the unrepresentable and enigmatic quality that some images possess. By painting through a detailed mimetic register that reproduces the visibility of spectral and barely legible images, I seek to make evident the overlap between the visible and the abstraction to which these dematerialised images tend. For this reason, I am interested in enhancing the diffuse value of these images, attempting a transit towards the visual, a state expressed as "the symptoms or traces of a mystery, without a recognisable meaning" (Didi-Huberman, 2010).
In conclusion, with painting I propose a crossing of the digital image with analogue and object-based practices, forming a hybrid work that symbolically questions the current imperative of binary and immediate logic, and seeks to shift the perception of the image towards the logic of the indeterminate.
Marcela Serra, artist.
May 2024.
Didi-Huberman, G. (2009). Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. Pennsylvania State University Press.
Sontag, S. (1989). On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Steyerl, H. (2012). The Wretched of the Screen. MIT Press.
