Double Exposure Halo

Vasco Barata has been developing a body of work intimately linked to what we usually call the image. The specificity of this practice is defined, in a field as broad and contradictory as the very definition of its subject, by the constant search for images and, more specifically, in contemporary art, by a form of relationship or dialogue between equals: image and individual.

From ancient Greece to the present day, the phenomenon of imagery has constituted a fertile field for speculation and problematization. How to deal with a "waking dream"? A "déjà vu"? An apparition? A commercial? A photograph? A ghost? Imagination?

We are inhabitants of a world of images that escapes us and, every day, reality proves to us the general inability to deal with the image in a balanced way (millions of daily selfies are an acute symptom of the intense, and certainly unequal, relationship we maintain with this singularity).

To move among images, we will always need a particular lexicon. Technique and technology have certainly been an advancement: “exposure,” “depth of field,” “revelation,” “chromatic aberration,” are just a few examples of concepts that operate at a close distance from the image. Before these, others were also used to guide us…

“Ghost,” “dream,” “mirror,” “specter” are pre-technological words that carry a particular mode of knowledge and relationship with images, and which, falling into disuse, will lose with them the specific knowledge they contain.

It is no coincidence, therefore, that the small publication produced and edited by CCCTV within the scope of this exhibition, like a small guide or instruction manual, presents us with a multiplicity of texts or particular words around two ideas – Ghosts and Symmetry – accompanied by the images exhibited in the gallery.

Within the scope of this exhibition, Vasco Barata uses some of these terms as a way to (re)activate/remember them, as well as their specific capacities for understanding and relating to images. In Double Exposure Halo, therefore, we find ourselves in the presence of images that evoke words, that evoke particular ways of seeing.