Catch a shadow, hear the light
Lara Castro Lema

A woman’s and an ant’s walk, a flash of lightning, a starry sky on a lens cap, a night of pixels, colour-coded sound, musical light… Cinema is a transcended gaze: gaze, form, thought, appearance, apparition, desire, narrative. The eye always finds something. Naked, it cannot hide from light and shadow, but it can hide from the recognisable. The eye can lose itself in inexplicable apparitions, in the pleasure of a flicker, in the illusion of a volume. The ear, on the other hand, hears what the eye does not see or, sometimes, what the eye sees in a different way. Faced with the same thing, experience is bifurcated. The senses, foreign to each other, translate everyday clashes into their own languages. In this way, fictions are constructed unintentionally, inevitable fictions. Blanca Rego’s work is presented in its simplicity as an inevitable, natural fiction. It unravels appearances, refracts them in a short, concise sentence, full of charm and suggestions. The pieces in this focus, from Wohlgemeynte to Psycho 60/98, are the result and testimony of a deep affection and fascination for the cinematographic medium as a plastic tool, a catalyst of subjectivities, of fragmentary appearances, and it reveals the material richness of digital cinema.

Blanca Rego’s images, as in a theatre of shadows, transport us to an ungraspable scene, that of light and colour, that of sound, which mingle, change positions, replace each other in a synaesthetic exchange, playing on metalanguage, but also on an emotional and poetic plane.

The focus on Blanca Rego’s work leads the viewer first through unknown forms of the known, surprising translations into shared languages, already frequented by the experimental cinema of the second half of the 20th century, whose legacy is taken up and paid homage to by the artist-filmmaker in her plasticity research, which this time is digital. Wohlgemeynte, A Singing Comet or Tximist, contain this kind of perceptual exchanges, whether translating data from a comet into abstract patterns of colour, generating an unintelligible sound reading from the glitched image of a text or converting the light of a storm into its own sound. On the other hand, the programme is also made up of pieces in which digital abstraction is replaced by an emotional and poetic abstraction of everyday forms. The movement of the camera, of feet, of light between trees or a shadow on the wall, become ideas, enveloped in the rhythmic trance of framing and sound. Komorebi, Streetwalker, 25,000 Years to Trap a Shadow 001 or Formicidae, are examples in which the landscape is diluted in elusive forms, flashes, shadows and mists, transforming into a place blurred by the movement and cadence of the sun’s rays or footsteps, where walking becomes something political and hypnotic, walking insects and people, shadows again, dancing on the screen. In addition, the focus on Blanca Rego shows yet another facet of the artist’s work, seeking to suggest the eye, the body in general, to generate a physical and psychedelic experience in order to reach the depths of seeing, or perhaps the surface, a metamorphic reaction to light, to the image stripped of all comprehensible information, of all narrative effort. This is the case of pieces such as You Blinked, RGB Colour Model or Silence is Golden but Chaos is still Broken.
In short, the focus that INTERSECCIÓN dedicates to the work of Blanca Rego constitutes a magnetic, reflexive, physical experience, a dream of strident colours, of footsteps, of night and of stars, a dream of cinema and its language, whose plasticity continues to be inexhaustible.