Roberto Lombana - Light and Movement

Roberto Lombana. Light and Movement
Catalog Essay by art historian Amalia Caputo

on Thursday January 28, 7 – 10 pm
at Art Nouveau Gallery
348 NW 29th St.
Museo Vault Building
Wynwood Arts District
Miami, Fl. 33127
305 573 4661
www.artnouveaumiami.com

“Roberto Lombana (Bogotá 1977) presents a new body of experimental large-format pieces that function as a poetic documentation of the passage of time, using a combination of long exposure, straight photography and the body in motion. The subjects or protagonists that make these explosive large-format black and white photographs possible are dancers from the London Royal Ballet during their rehearsals at the Teatro Colón in Bogotá. The opportunity to photograph them immediately became the vehicle of his experiments in movement, by focusing on the study of time in photography. Photography is in essence, the process of drawing through the use of light, the visual representation of a spatial-temporal fraction on a stable emulsified surface. Lombana uses this strategy to produce a complete body of work where the poetics and theatricality of corporal movement, as well as the technicalities of photography are intimately intertwined.

(…)With Light and Movement he prefers to play with time through the use of the straightforward tripod, long-exposure shot, without further digital intervention, combining the darkness of the scenario with the skilled movement of dancers. Above all, Lombana is interested in the possibility of controlling and freezing movement, of capturing the moments right before and after a dancer arrives at a pose through a contemplative narrative between the moving body and its capture of motion through radiance – light energy – on a sensitive surface. Lombana, inspired by the precepts of the Kinetic art movement, in which the eye is forced to move and construct colors and movement in complicity with the artwork, realizes that the slow shutter speed determines the intent to capture movement and, simultaneously, freeze its trace. He rationalizes abstraction and the kinetic by freezing motion in time.

Lombana´s strategy is to control exposure, to manipulate the shot and not the final image, to grasp the poetic gestures of a dancer´s body. Most importantly, however, his main interest is to engage the spectator by producing images that stimulate motion in the eye, hence the brain, inviting it to travel tirelessly through the image in the search of possible connections.” Amalia Caputo.