MATTER AS A METAPHOR
Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta
Tarkovsky said that he preferred to express himself in a metaphorical way and not so much in a symbolic or descriptive manner, he said that symbols contain a meaning that is too precise and intellectual, while the metaphor is a more open and sensitive image that has the same indefinition as that of the worlds that it tries to represent. The infinite cannot be explained from the definite. It is in this imprecise and stimulating area that the research of Alejandro Javaloyas (Palma, 1987) is carried out, a work that is born from accumulated knowledge, lived experience and shared emotion to introduce, little by little, the coordinates of chance, the unpredictable predictability of the algorithm, and the irrepressible drift of that artificial intelligence that grows faster than we can comprehend.
Floating Matter is a visual exploration that begins with a mass that is weightless and heavy at the same time, a foreign body that the artist inoculates in those liminal zones, in those spaces of uncertainty where perception loses its certainty, where the idea does not have a single definition, and beauty comes into contact with restlessness. A project that revolves around the mysterious uneasiness caused by that enigmatic and blurred rock that levitates in uninhabited landscapes, in which the human presence is intuited by the trail that’s left behind. This floating matter is an image, a metaphor, that is constantly repeated in Javaloyas's works: in his expanded drawings, in his digital postpaintings, in his suggestive videos, in his premeditated found installations and, of course, in that ultraphotography which claims its independence while efficiently explaining other ways of creating.
This dark mass that stars in his works, an inert matter with an almost living appearance, seems to be frozen in a certain movement, in a parabola that leaves the groove of his trajectory and anticipates the premonitory projection of an itinerary that is to come, something like the fluid stroke of an in-progress drawing, like the rhythm of the notes on the stave in an unfinished composition, like the curves of a heartbeat that does not know its own end. Some pieces that are not satisfied with introducing the poetry of the disturbing in the aesthetics of everyday life, but also establish a timely reflection on how images are built and who makes them, on what they mean and what they are for. Some works that start from the unfathomable heritage of a new digital intelligence that continues to accumulate forms, concepts and ways for the artist to guide, select and intervene in a conjunction of talent, sensitivity, criteria, causality and chance.
To generate all the two-dimensional pieces that make up this project, Alejandro Javaloyas initiates a peculiar conversation with that artificial intelligence that is reaching enormous power and dimensions. The digital device responds to the textual prompts that the artist inputs, producing a succession of algorithmic images where the creator only controls the previous words that make them germinate. Through this process, a wide set of visual representations is obtained that try to converge towards all those ideas that Javaloyas has been supplying. Many of these images are lost in translation, others deviate in form or concept, while some, the fewest, are in tune with the research that this creator is meticulously developing.
Precisely these induced works, selected and modified by the artist but generated by artificial intelligence, call into question the very description of the idea of authorship or the more traditional definition of photography. The Floating Matter project is immersed in this intense current process in which the photographic language seeks its most complete autonomy, getting rid of its servitude as a notary of a reality reproduced ad nauseam, discarding its pictorialist drift, the narrativity of documentary film, even the pedantic rhetoric of postphotography. A new photography without photos, sometimes without a camera, where the author only provides a thought, a barely verbalized mental image, which takes shape through that unfathomable digital archive directed by an algorithm that, perhaps, knows more about us than ourselves.
Floating Matter is the expression of an ultraphotography that has achieved its freedom. A project where what becomes relevant are the light and its absence, the disturbing and also the abstract beauty, the material, the immaterial and the digital, the reproduction of the image, its uniqueness and its aura, the infinity, the universe and the metaverse, the microscopic and the telescopic, the nuclear and the liminal, the reflection, the mirror and the glass, the precarious balance, the subtle and the infra-weightless, the photographic support, its texture and its grain, the blur, the distortion and the aberration, the interference and the error, the fracture and the accident, the passage of time and the stopped time, but also the game, the irony, the fun and the absurd subversion of the daily life. Some characteristics, especially the latter, that also define the object installations with a deliberately spontaneous appearance and those enigmatic and suggestive video creations that Alejandro Javaloyas intersperses in the exhibition space. All this to give shape to a singular metaphor of our life through a disturbing matter that floats. And that is, among other things, the purpose of images.
Back to Floating Matter