Inside and Outside…

Some words about Lucia Pizzani’s Absent Portraits

Cette âme, cette ombre, ce bruit d’une ombre qui, nous dit le poète, veux son unité, on l’entend du dehors sans pouvoir être sur qu’elle est dedans. Dans cet « horrible en dedans-en dehors » des parole non formulées, des intentions d’être inachevés, l’être, a l’intérieur de soi, digère lentement son néant. Sa néantisation durera « des siècles ». La rumeur de l’être des on-dit se prolonge dans l’espace et dans le temps. En vain, l’âme bande ses derniers forces, elle est devenue remous de l’être finissant.

Gastón Bachelard

Talking about Henri Michaux’s surrealist prose poem “Space of shadow” Gaston Bachelard - in his book “The Poetics of Space” - elaborates a long argument about the particularities and edges of this trembling flow between the inside and the outside, about the constant space of transposition and exchange of the human being, an in-between zone in which mankind endlessly moves and transfigures. Bachelard describes a complex and exhausting relation between the environment and the constant flow of past and future.

The ideas of the French philosopher point at certain images by surrealist poet Michaux: entrance and exit, light and darkness, opposites in the delirium of an eternal question, uncertainties of a human being that dissolves in order to manifest himself within his own eternal inconsistency: the dialectics of the inside and the outside and the terrible, shadowy and ungraspable space that comes to be in between these two sides; a space produced by a disturbing relationship, a disturbance which seems to have no way out according to both the philosopher and the poet.

A considerable part of the art works by Lucía Pizzani, seems to resemble this strange inner geometry in which this discussion takes place; a time that has been delayed and folded over the individual and the waning of himself portrayed by Bachelard and Michaux. In the case of this artist, photography and video are the instruments with which she sets-up the scene for the architectural fragility of this non-inhabited place; the presence and absence of a misplaced subject that multiplies in spectrums of light and confusing corners… doors to be opened, certain spots in the landscape and vague approaches to it.

Designs and watery variations of oneself go through periods of hiding, rejection, growth and fracturing – dissolving in a photographic set that encompasses visions of the body mixed with wide and unknown environments in her series Liquida, shadows that dilute over the outdoor landscape and dialectical constructions of the gaze over herself; a confuse exchange as proposed in her piece “Pedazos”, where the focus of the camera, the pondering of the individual about herself and the reflection of mirrors from where she takes the shot come together in a complex perspective that unfolds dynamically before the spectator.

With a disciplined and constant performance in the fields of image production and audiovisual creation, Pizzani stands as a young artist basically concerned with the instability of the self and its fractures within contemporary world. Her worries lead her to use herself as a subject-object for self-representation. Nevertheless, this self-representation in her visual production does not deliberately constitute a critical position towards any specific subject or even towards a re-design of a story yet to be told. Both the rising of a random and anxious strive for unity typical of the fractured self and the impossibility to achieve that unity stand out in her work. Therefore, the characters portrayed by Pizzani and the variations of herself constantly rearranged in her work come very close to both Bachelard’s shadow – back in the beginning of this text – and to that ambiguous being represented by Michaux as the movement of a desperate will to achieve unity when it is impossible to avoid disappearing completely.

Under these conditions, the fact that self-representation is a key element in Pizzani’s work is nothing else but the denial of the possibility for the self, structuring as a dual and ambiguous representation of lost unity. That is the reason why nature and landscape are important elements in the configuration of her proposition. The split individual dissolves in space and his many fractures spread and unfold over a natural world as ephemeral, contractual and deadly as the subtle torture that toils the shadows of the excluded individual. In the images by Pizzani the notions of inside and outside are always present as a movement and constant exchange of self vanishing confronted to the traces of the circumstantial environment, both ends resulting in a visual product that reconstructs a certain kind of micro-radiographies of unusual landscapes, macro-sensorial panoramas where one becomes wide and the wholeness is nothing and the perspective of light over the pores and details, which transform into massive topographies as an imprecise map of life and of the skin.

It is in this in-and-out persistently reconstructed by Pizzani’s work, in this tormented place described by Bachelard as one of fear and horror, that the geometries of the process of vanishing rise to stand out in the photographic and visual corpus by the artist who suggests – in some way or another – a sort of silent leap. The dissolution, the confusion, the madness and finally the anguish generated by encounters – or rather “dis-encounters” of an individual subject to a lost of wholesomeness – seem to have merged into this images. The shadow of the self recognizes itself as diluting, watery, land-like and uneven, and finally gives up to a visual architecture that comes to be after becoming aware of its own impossibility.

We finally obtain an artistic process where the vanishing and self-representative presences in Pizzani’s work – a set of works compiling her pieces since 2004 – are kind of an essential delirium that frees itself in some way or another: the shadow and its fall merge into these images with their surrounding environment, and a split individual walks in and out in order to completely awaken – by means of photography in a shy gesture of light and certitude – the consciousness of her own death, the impossibility to achieve unity and permanence.

The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge - it does not - but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions.

Paul de Man