Carolina Saquel's Fictions of Formlessness (A PROPOS DE CUERO VIVO)
A text by Maria Berrios (in the catalogue for the group show "L'Envers du Décor", Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, 2010)
Through an increasingly embodied use of video, Carolina Saquel has explored the myriad possibilities of the point of view as a subject for the transformation of nature as form. Using the moving image as medium for altering perceptions of temporality, her work has transited form reflections on painting- the frame as a window to the world- to what could be considered a sculptural use of the moving image. Saquel’s current work observes nature as hard material, playing with the textures, tonality and rhythm of the image, that through camera movements and perspective turn its matter into narrative. By altering the supposedly presented, in an almost structuralist way –creating a materialist dialectic tension with the out of frame– only to immediately betray and bastardize all principles of structuralist film by turning the constructed shape into a character in itself. Going even further, bordering the esoteric, the moving image process is used to burst the mold of the subject matter, by -as the artist herself has noted- “insisting on the dimensions of the threatening and obscure”. Saquel thrusts her matter into the uncontrollable realm of formlessness. Seemingly ordinary natural subjects, like trees in a forest or water in a tank are turned into, or unveiled, as living creatures.
Using her camera to dive into the unknown, Saquel confronts her latest projects as open laboratories, where the shooting process intentionally crashes with the obscurity of nature as material to be molded into an unexpected being. This almost organic approach transforms the filming experience and process into the result, the live model (a park, a well, a waterfall) and the artist’s relation to it through the camera, is the ‘coming into presence’ of the film itself. Close observation is used by Saquel to trespass the limits of formalism by allowing ‘the miasmic area of experience’ to take over. There is no desire to tread through the vastness of dark content, on the contrary Saquel’s work plays in the wilderness of fiction and non-transparency.
CAROLINA SAQUEL
