POLVO (DUST)
José Luis Cuevas (Mexico, 1973)
“Given the hierarchy of the body's organs, lung cancer is felt to be less shameful than rectal cancer”
Susan Sontag. Illness as a metaphor.
Short fragment of his extensive images, this exhibition is a non-chronological lateral approach to Jose Luis Cuevas oeuvre nourished by a certain matter: man and his traces in the animate and inanimate.
Witnessing the construction of everything from human vision, Cuevas presents an extension of himself through images that are scattered as our eccentricities in the various searches of a same beyond.
In Spanish, Polvo (Dust) is defined by the Real Academia Española as something that could be translated as the “smaller part of the very dry earth, which with any movement rises in the air” and the “set of solid particles that floats and settles on the objects”. Polvo is also slang for “coitus” and “make-up cosmetic”.
The fragments captured by the photographer guard a world freed from its slags, where transcendence remains uncertain. Thus, Cuevas composes a purification of the sordid in subjects and objects of an ever greater universe threatened to become ashes.
Rather than proposing a set of harmoniously beautiful units, POLVO puts us before the indispensable fragmentation that resists representation. The extended view of "all" according to Cuevas, is elaborated by framing the "parts".
The glance derives from extremities to machinations that become in organs or vestiges, as if asking of what we are made of, so that the occult acquires an autonomous existence, revealing its unsettling particularity.
A certain monumentality in the volumes is reminiscent of religious iconography or forensic practice, at other times they seem diffuse as seen through the smoke of an incenser communicating us with something that transcends a liberating latitude of perception.
