Curator: Fernando Castro Flórez
Starting point
The accuracy of the matter wounded by the light arises from the - fortuitous - encounter and the insistence on creating a dialogue "of images" around an idea that has been repeated in the successive conversations held by both artists: light as tangible matter. Attracted by the idea of the use of light as an artistic material, a clear connection of opposites is established in both ways of posing their praxis and methodologies in the constituent process of the work.
Mikha-ez's pieces generally generate a reflection effect, project light, while in Gloria López's engravings, light is what draws, the one that tears the surface to finally generate the image, following the photoengraving technical process. In both processes, light is the protagonist, the one that is emitted and absorbed, the one that is reflected and finally reveals the imaginary. It is about light and the "obsession" to contain it, fix it, reproduce it and ultimately make it corporeal.
Turning point
"From now on the fundamental element of these new technologies will no longer be the skill of the hand, but the accuracy of the matter wounded by the light", said Guilles Multigner.
Both projects arise -from the necessity- of the analytical and scientific observation of light. Both in the diagrams of optics developed by Isaac Newton in the 18th century, and in the botanical studies of the 19th century by the Englishwoman Anna Atkins, there is a fixation on discovering the exactitude of the tangible and intangible. If we look for the definition of botany, we observe that it brings together the following actions: description, classification, distribution, identification, physiology, morphology, relationships with other living beings and effects caused on the environment in which they are found. In the same way, these actions respond to the analysis that Newton carried out on questions of optics, the reciprocal relationships of light with nature. Both use the precession of light to graph "the real" and define, if it can be done, its limits, a fact that leads us to the paradox of the light that feeds the flower -the petal- and the light that feeds the electrical image.