A Mediterranean landscape, a prolonged dry season with winter rainfall, the presence of medium-height shrubs, spinal cords, herbs, hills, a variety of recognizable birds such as the chincol, the quail, the loica, the partridge, the hummingbird, the turtledove and the thrush . A landscape melted into rubble, plastic, waste, antennas and people. A tired and submerged place in the city, a terrible place contrary to nature. That landscape could be my original landscape; that landscape is a description of my surroundings; that landscape is or perhaps was part of the Aconcagua valley, a place where I have lived intermittently for 26 years.

From an early age I have dedicated myself to contemplating the landscape, always expectant of what my sight gives me, observing from the moving windows the frame pass by; in a certain way, contemplation became a refuge. Starting in 2009, I began to visit different natural places to disconnect from the city, but over time these places have been contaminated by “waste”, often large objects that have been decommissioned.

These objects began to be part of the landscape, to be physically but absent in the presence of the rest. Little by little I began to snoop around these objects like someone who goes to the flea market at the end of the month; Ever since I was little I was fascinated by collecting objects on my travels. Finally, in 2019, I decided to deepen this act of exploration and accompany it with the record, giving rise to three moments: contemplate, collect and project. I have called this Brief Praise. 

To contemplate is to pay attention to something material or spiritual. It is also to keep in mind something or someone whom we want to please, either out of interest or respect. It is also to occupy oneself with such intensity in thinking about a God and considering his divine attributes, approaching worship. But above all contemplating is more than an act or action, it is an environment or experience, where I position myself in front of or in the place; and then distance myself from that moment. In this way it becomes a sensory and analytical experience, managing to establish a relationship with what is "contemplated".

Collect comes from collect, gather, resume. How to collect the fruits of a harvest, or gather things or people from different sources. It is also to group or gather, how to collect funds for a cause or spectators for a conference. It contains the collect together with the prefix re- (backwards), that is to say, a turning back or a look back.

Collecting is a consecutive part of contemplating, that is, “I contemplate then I collect”; paraphrasing Descartes. Like contemplation, it is more of an experience than an action. It is through the collection that I penetrate the distance between what is contemplated and my person, this performative and ritualistic action opens the way to the cult image; photographic record. In this way, the registry is considered as a collection of images.

Finally, space is given to projection, a consequence of projecting something; commonly a light image on a surface. It is also used in psychoanalysis to attribute defects or intentions in another person that someone does not want to recognize in himself. Although the word project comes from proiectare (throw forward), said origin is closer to projecting the image in front of oneself, in this case, positioning ourselves in front of the fata morgana.

At first I go to meet the landscape, the object and the gaze. Then I distance myself, I get closer, I reflect and build from these encounters. Something similar to the gesture of L'objet trouvé, but focusing attention on the absence of the forgotten or ignored object, preferably absent. 

The encounter takes place in clandestine landfills, these places where people commit the act of disposing of their “garbage” unnoticed and improperly. They try to forget the crime and move on. The objects, here, have history. They are places full of memory and oblivion.

In El Encuentro y su Veladura, I record the act of going to the place in search of these encounters, the landscape, and the collection of objects. As in Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse by Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and the Gleaner), an exploration of the debris of society, among the rubble of abandoned memory to reuse oblivion (memory as the object and oblivion as its absence ).

Gleaning images, impressions, emotions, there is no legislation, and figuratively gleaning is a mental activity. Gleaning facts, acts, exploits, gleaning information and since I don't have a good memory, what I glean sums up my travels.
Agnes Varda

After working with these objects extracted from the “memory dump”, drawing them, replicating them, hiding them and transforming them, I decide to veil them. With this gesture, I try to make them visible again/make them appear through the veiled body, that is, reincorporate them through a kind of absence.

This is how A Look at the Absent Object arises, where I take a dying object and restore it, or rather, put it in evidence and also try to generate or insinuate other multiple objects, taking advantage of the glaze. 

There is a game between the visible and the invisible, a time that depends on how we look and what we want to look at or observe.

Whenever my destiny is to recognize a place, I tend to adapt my gaze to the space; In vacant and desolate places I first recognize the magnitude of the place by looking at the horizons, and then reduce my gaze to where I am going, in that act my dialogue with the site begins and “chance” is integrated into the game. In abandoned buildings, I immediately internalize myself with the place, analyzing its walls, its ceilings, its supporting skeleton (perhaps for fear of collapse) and once again the random encounter between myself and the architectural space with its tenants begins.

Of my explorations, what I remember most are my encounters with mysterious objects, somewhat strange to understanding, who make me question their past and their status.

What are they?      

What were they?

Mostly deployable objects, to me corpses of what they once were.

Brief Praise's journey starts from innocent observation and contemplation, going through collection and unleashing projection, where the object is no longer my model, but the input. Fixation by reflection begins, a fiction of reality is created, it is possible to see the real through its reflection.

In my case the reflection becomes a body, but rather a suspended body, a visible mass like a cloud.

We have the loss of the body but the appearance of the image. A subtle, ethereal image, with a vaporous density, an image in transit to loss, an image that gives the impression of disintegration, of an object about to disappear. I call it: fragile image.

A mirage is a mirror reflection on an object that exists and you can see, but not touch.
Herzog.

Like Herzog, I have admired the illusion of the image, in my case the reflection of the object. But at the same time re-enchanted by the fragility of the image.

The starting point is born from a sculptural exploration towards the discarded models of daily use (vegetables, fruits, tea bags, bread, breadcrumbs, etc.) and a crossing with Brief Praise. The act of contemplating the everyday and its waste is equivalent to the search for the cult value that the project seeks, in this way begins the fixation and photographic desire for registration by these implicit models-objects of everyday life. The procedure culminated in the reflection of the object, which contains its ephemerality, and at the same time its illusion and insinuation.

The hologram is a three-dimensional image created through the use of a laser. The laser allows the microscopic recording of a photosensitive film: when an interference occurs between two light beams, the light of one of the beams can be reflected on the object.

In this case, the series, Nothing discernible object is closer to a three-dimensional image, since it is generated only by the refraction of light. 
Through the construction of a prism (holographic device), it is possible to create a three-dimensional image with the use of light. The methacrylate (material used, PVC, plastic) acts as a light reflector, and the interference that occurs between two coherent light beams makes it possible for the light of one of these to be reflected in the pyramid. By receiving a point light from the center of the smartphone, it projects a three-dimensional image, processed and illuminated in a precise way, the images can appear going out of their limits, outside or inside the frame.

That the final image in the hologram manages to contain both the abandonment of the physical sculptural object, the return of the absent object and the displacement of the image towards an illusory support (fata morgana).

In this way the object itself is nothing more than a spectrum of it.

***

Brief praise is a coming and going, where there is the value of worship towards the enigmatic image, an existing and forgotten object, even sometimes not visible. The enigma of what it will be, around the illusion of its silhouette, the outline of its shape under the glaze, under the mantle. But also  about the illusion of its pigment, of the ephemeral reflection that hints at a mass but reveals a color. In both cases fragile and latent images. A pensive image charged with ambivalence, typical of the experience in front of the fata morgana. An image that abandons passivity and moves away from the traditional format, which begins to go from the abstract to the concrete.

Abel Vasquez A.