Vera Lutter, the resistance to the hyperreal

Ibiza,

If, in our digital era, the images no longer reflect reality, but threaten to replace it, Vera Lutter’s photograph can contribute to this context a silent but radical form of resistance: by rejecting the aesthetics of the hyperreal, it comes to return to that image its physical and temporal dimension, that which explains its first conception as a light fossil, as an event itself.

The creations of this German artist, resident in New York, study the potential of the so -called dark camera, or Pin-Hole Camerato capture the effects of light on architecture, urban and industrial landscape and even the interior of its study or old abandoned factories, using mirrors to favor the multiplicity of possible perceptions around the chosen spaces.

Each of its compositions is the result of a thorough work process that extends for several days and entails the manufacture of special cameras that fit the size of the works; the transformation of your apartment or your study, in the case of photographs that capture these places; or the conversion of an unused barracks in an appropriate dark room for their investigations. It darkens the rooms and has the photographic role generating a scenario in which the light acts. What happens after its windows will be reflected inside; Lutter sits and waits for what has to happen, happens. This mechanics allows you to register all ephemeral fact that takes place around the chosen site: the passage of vehicles and people, and everything that is in motion, is diluted in its images, sometimes leaving ghostly traces.

Not only do they translate reality, but they reveal a hollow and occasional world that transmits the viewer feeling fluent and serenity. The great flat extensions that can form sky and water in these photos contrast with the extraordinary precision of some of its details and with the wealth and density of the materials that configure them. Vera Lutter adopts the role, fundamentally, of an intuitive observer of an environment that is perceived through the patient accumulation of the evolutionary traces of light on the photographic role: an alternative vision of citizen mobility in the contemporary era, of the transformation of urban spaces and the slow metamorphosis of the cities, is revealed.

Until next October, Parra & Romero for the first time exhibits Lutter’s work in his Ibizan space. The “Speak Memory” exhibition comes to emphasize that it gives us an archeology of the perception of an invitation to reconsider how we observe, remember and interact with the visible world; In short, we propose to stop at the real, just as she dedicates hours, days or weeks in slow, tactile and physical work whose duration is manifested in her large -scale negatives, inverted and silent images that embody an obvious counterpoint to the superficial immediacy of that digital culture. The aesthetics and the reasons selected are, in the face of this positioning, secondary for this author, who studied sculpture at the Akademie der Bilddenden Künste de Munich before obtaining a master’s degree in photography at the New York Visual Arts School: The image I am looking for must be in two worlds: the acquaintance and the stranger. I am not interested in creating beautiful scenes or mere documentation; I am interested in placing the viewer, somehow, to the limit.

Printed spectra on silver jelly, their work evades reproduction or multiplication and its urban landscapes are plunged into an ethereal atmosphere that gives each scene a melancholy difficult to define.