Leggendo il tempo

DONATA WENDERS
Leggendo il tempo

Inauguration, Thursday May 5, 6pm-9pm.
From May 4 to 27 June 2018

It’s typical for the human ego to wish to achieve something that remains to leave traces in a continuously expanding universe. This often takes the form of flashes of genius studied for eternity. The commitment also involves the wish to immortalize an image for posterity, to make a fleeting moment enduringly visible.

Donata Wenders’s photographs possess an emotional timbre. Far from creating a temporal correlation, they lead the observer into associative spaces of their own. These photographs intuitively relate what Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle clarified at the start of the 20th century: the heart of human existence does not consist in a foreseeable linear vanishing point but rather in a nearing to a blurring of content that guides our thoughts and dreams irregularly. In more or less the same period, Miguel de Unamuno made one his characters reflect that, ‘Life is just this – mist. Life is a nebula’. Donata Wenders’s photographs describe the situational conditions associated with a gaze. As if through a ‘misty absence’, the photograph entitled Rising Thought (2015) frees the gaze over a seated female figure holding a paintbrush in a posture that is at once contemplative and creative. In Portrait in a Haze (2015) a female portrait shines gently against a milky background – the poetry of a fleeting moment. The photographer is constantly playing with detail and imprecision, adjusting the focus all of a sudden – on a canvas in the foreground, for example, as in Portrait von Ronit I (2015). Other works, such as Talytha (2002), distract viewers lost in their own reflections and associations and bring them into the hic et nunc of the exhibition room with the clear, direct gaze of the person portrayed. In the new series of Studies (2017/2018), Donata Wenders again accompanies the viewer on a gently discursive and refractive wave, restoring the photograph to the heart of the image – to the narrative trace of the moment.

Anna Duque y González