Landscapes/Paisajes by Eduardo Gil

Artist Statement:

Artist Portfolio: Eduardo Gil
Title: Landscapes/Paisajes
Home Country: Argentina
Website: www.eduardogil.com

In Landscapes/Paisajes, I deepen a self-deconstructing process, which is a critical reformulation of my past production.

Portraits were very important in my first work and continued to be essential in many works after that. The issue of the gaze, which was always present in my pictures and my discourse, is suppressed here.

I am interested in the effect of the eyes closed, the absence of the gaze and the tension this absence triggers.

As María Cristina Bacchetta says, referring to Landscapes/Paisajes: The gaze of another reflects my own gaze, it reflects “me”, it is where I can see that another confirms me or rejects me, and, finally, confirms me although he or she might reject me... If I cannot see the eyes, the gaze looking at me, if I am not the gaze, I run the risk of loosing myself. The risk of not being, or also being nothing. Something is left undefined, something is suspended…

The background, gray, is always the same and the lightning scheme is identical. There are no clothes, jewelry or elements that may suggest anything more about the people photographed other than what life has been etching in their faces…

According to Cecilia Cerutti “in the photographs which make the series Landscapes/Paisajes, temporality has been meticulously considered and the body has resulted in the first object caught in that consideration. Apparently similar among them and devoid of identity, subjectivity and distinctions. These are bodies divested, naked, stripped of roots and territory. It is moving to find bodies without pretenses, without adornments, without makeup in times when spectacularization, forced identity and appearances are the rule.”

In Landscapes/Paisajes, as well as in the rest of my recent production, I try to distance myself from any and all anecdote, any expressionist temptation and also any attempt to symbologize to place myself, alone with the resources of the instrument -the machine- before something which imposes me by its sole referential potential.

I try to shed off my trade, my “experience.” To move aside. To force myself to a certain abstinence. To let the indicative power of the photograph manifest itself silently, obstinately…, and, if anything could be said about emotion in my work, it is the one arising from pure perception, in the words of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “from the whisper of the visual print from which it derives.”

— Eduardo Gil