Hoje, nada

Hoje, nada [Today, nothing] (Cesare Pavese’s summary of a day in The Business of Living) brings together a very diverse group of photographs and objects – including some from previous series and several new works – which reveal places, things, captured gestures and images that indicate methods of inventory and archiving. The extreme close-up’s stand out. We can consider these to be vague, diffuse and elusive images, which apparently seek to evade their referent. Or, we can simply accept them as assertions of the factitious, precarious and partial nature of the image.

What experience of the real does each image elicit from us, when nothing seems to happen? How does the image look at us and link us to a past? In what way are we framed by each image beyond the visible, beyond what can be represented? These are questions that Daniel Blaufuks raises frequently through a visual practice that demands another attention, another perceptive availability, between aesthetic appreciation as well as narrative and temporal speculation. These questions are susceptible to lead us towards a rhizomatic network of possibilities of growth and permanently delayed perspectives, and – at the same time – seem to reflect the random array of possibilities of imagination and rememoration.

Without following any chronological or narrative thread, the artist’s works appear as pieces of an essentially fragmentary, disjointed and centrifugal reality. A suspended world without horizon, within which almost everything is out of reach. This context further accentuates Daniel Blaufuks’ attraction to the literary and cinematic domains as categories that are closely connected to the exercise of speculation and fiction. Here the indeterminate value of the works as legitimate (and necessary) forms and means of representing and questioning reality, reinforces the potential of the image as a sign that understands and transmits time as immersion.