Technique
B&W film photography. Direct capture. Silver gelatin baryta based paper. Sepia and selenium toner.
Presentation
Jaromir Hladík –in the short story “The Secret Miracle” by Jorge Luis Borges- finds himself near his end and gets the extraordinary gift of time. This is a divine period: he renews, re-signifies and broadens his life´s sense, setting his existence back into motion .
Above all, Hladik wants to continue… To reopen and go through the paths of existence in order to go towards an illusory appealing horizon which is always an imaginary, changing, unreachable line. Hladik demands God the possibility of justification: a reason to exist. He fervently hopes not to be a pointless repetition or him smallest mistake.
What is this line, this vanishing threshold? What is it behind this veiled curtain, this foggy horizon? Emptiness and nothingness, an abysm that covers existence with truth and beauty. Even so this enigmatic dreadful nothingness is fundamental for the existence of art, where the sublime reaches its highest form. Eugenio Trías offers an accurate reference to this transcendence which is typical of art. In his book “Lo bello y lo siniestro”, Rainer Maria Rilke’s quote puts into words the terrible chasm artistic creation gravitates around: “beautiful is the beginning of the terrible we can still bear”.
In the photo portfolio “The Secret Miracle”, I try to address this horizon which justifies and redeems the individual, driving him along the intricate path of the never-ending questioning about time and existence.
