- Exhibition program
- Cycle: Explicit silence
- Author
- Mayte Vieta
- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- TRES
Losing all sense of exclusion. Being at the centre.
John Berger
Mayte Vieta (Blanes, Catalonia, 1971) has photographed the surface of the sea on numberless occasions, always with a particular sensitivity to the use of light. Her installation titled Silence (1999), in which she portrayed herself with placid ambiguity under a sea filled with light, was the start of a period of productivity that led to a career that has placed her among the most promising young artists in Spain. Ten years later and during a shift in her work after giving birth to her first child, the artist has returned to the depths of the sea to construct a monumental triptych on silence through which she establishes a dialogue between herself, the viewer, and art on the subject of human fragility and death.
Her new photographic installation, bodies of Light, submerges us in a sea that is very different from that of Silence. This time she portrays a night sea that shuns the light with which the artist illuminates it. Its blackness finds continuity in the darkness of an Espai 13 painted black that in this way becomes an integral part of the work. Within this darkness, however, the beam of light projected below the surface of the sea reveals the presence of a naked, life-size, female body floating alone in the midst of a total void. It is a body that opens up itself to us, unfolding in what seems like a slow, tortuous, yet liberating process.
The viewer situated in the centre of the space is engulfed by the stillness of a weightless abyss and a time that seems suspended. Pain, desire, dreams, and death are evoked from a silence and a disturbing darkness through which our own fragility percolates.
