Collection
Blind Image #125 (Blue image)
- 2006
- Acrylic on canvas
- 199,5 x 199,5 cm
- Cat. P_744
- Acquired in 2008
- Observations: The following text appears in the work; 'Still from a film (above): Over the top of my plate I could see Chenault’s legs, small and firm and tan. She was so close to naked, and so apparently unaware of it, that I felt helpless' This is an extract from the novel The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson (1998), which was filmed in 2011 by Bruce Robinson (and shown in Spain under the title Diario de un seductor).
Blind Image is one of the most significant series produced by João Louro in the past few decades. As the title says, it features blind, monochrome images whose surfaces act as mirrors, reflecting the viewer's gaze. It is based on the suppression or cancellation of images as a strategy for sparking curiosity in the observer.
As with other pieces in the series, Blind Image # 125 (Blue image) (2006) contains a footnote in the form of a short story that seems to be a fragment of a longer text, alluding indirectly to something that is absent. Curator María de Corral writes of this work and its text references that it is capable of giving rise to 'different approaches to what is visible and different perspectives for considering the image, helping us to realise that the gap between words and pictures is narrower than that between words and objects, between culture and nature'. That gap hints at the underlying idea in Walter Benjamin's The Dialectics of Seeing, and his desire for objects to return the gaze of observers.
Accordingly, an analogy can be drawn between the surfaces in Louro's works, which act as interfaces (a modified camera obscura) and other tricks of optical perspective dreamed up centuries ago by scientists and artists: artefacts that brought the gaze to a stop and enabled images to be constructed more gradually. This allegory of the acceleration (or rather deceleration) of the image and its mass production is one of the main areas explored in Louro's work.
Other works by João Louro