Cecilia Luci’s Reversed lens
Marco Tonelli
In writing about photography one always has to first confront the source of an unease in the photographer: are they an artist who takes photographs or a photographer who makes works of art? The same argument can be applied to video-makers – are they film directors or video artists? – and to practically every other contemporary technique or aesthetic practice.
I got to know Cecilia Luci as a photographer and now it is increasingly difficult to consider her as such. Not because she has changed her technique, nor just because she has developed new different subjects. I would say that the shift from photographer to artist has enabled her approach to the medium, the image, and the content to develop in a gradual and organic way.
Her first works to clearly mark a departure from the confines of the purely photographic date from 2010-2011: Costellazioni familiari (Familiar Constellations).This departure can be seen as taking a different path and identifying themes in which technique is no longer focussed on what is external to oneself but is turned inwards.
Although even the most inexperienced photographers may put something of themselves into their photographs, it is not necessarily the case that even the most technically skilled photographers will turn their lens inwards on themselves.
In Cecilia Luci’s work and in her thematic sequence of recent years, it is clear that photography is a way for her to make notes about her memories and her losses, her fragilities and her epiphanies. A story told in images as a journal, where the objects at times show themselves for what they are, at others for what they appear to be, or again for what they have been, and finally perhaps for what they will be. The fragility to which I allude, the tenuousness of some images at the limits of presence, the appearance of reflections of light that are more solid than the object they come from – all this I call fragile because it demands an effort to consolidate it, otherwise it risks shattering, dispersing in the liquid that contains it.
It is Made in Water. Nothing is more unstable and uncertain than working in water. And yet, in spite of this uncertainty, the photographs of Cecilia Luci the artist seem to be trying to consolidate something, a history, which outside this fluid container would perhaps not find purchase. They are made in water to concentrate the images, to fix them, to hold them. So it is not the release of the shutter that fixes the work; this has already been done by composing it in water, which becomes a mental and physiological element.
For years now water has been for Cecilia Luci a rigid container, an organizer that affirms the collocations; while living out their uncertain destiny in water, they are also defined in water. There is an almost geometrical principle contained in water which only the lens of a camera, a frame, can impose on tenuous and delicate subjects, where there is no aspiration of a symbolic charge, although it could seem so at times when presented with empty cages, combs, chop-sticks from Shanghai or broken glass. Nor is it only a question, by association, of objects taken at random for their meaning. Let us say that in water a subtle, fragile, and delicate equilibrium is achieved between a public and a geometric dimension and between an intimate and a private one, in which the object protects the strands, at times literally, that link it with the emotional sphere of the author, by protecting them in water.
Since 2011, Cecilia Luci has honed the iconography of her work from one series to another, and this exhibition represents the least crowded point, as it were: it is more transparent (literally in the case of the glass panes), less opaque, where interruptions in the chromatic compactness of the surface (which should be remembered is also depth) are linear, teeth of combs, almost pencil strokes, thread-like in fact.
No longer either shadows or reflections, nor trasparencies given by the objects and their tones almost diluted in the liquid, or by geometries subtended by spherical shapes. These latest works by Cecilia Luci then become the gaze turned in on oneself but at the same time redirected outwards, as if the camera were now photographing internal objects without any longer looking beyond. It is as if the lens was looking for something to latch onto inside the liquid in a state of apnoea in order not to leave the author’s body. And so the role of these thread-like presences seems to be as frameworks, as ties, as obstacles to enclose the lens, without any longer illustrating the attempt to capture.
Where once the Playmobil figures physically and figuratively blocked this point of view from the author’s body if not actually from cages, now the lens does not seem to want to leave the body, it seems to have become a transparent body, to have become water more than image.
The fragility of these images then should not be seen in a narrative sense (the subjects are tenuous in a slender, fragile way) but in a physical one. It is the photographic image in its framed glass-enclosed structure, because it is under glass, that points up an endemic fragility. Strength and weakness become blurred, the limits of the images are clear but it is also impossible to intuit the depth or even the material of which they are made.
If we now look for the photographic in Cecilia Luci’s works in order to better define it in light of what has been said so far, we shall have to decide whether an endogenous or an exogenous principle is applicable to the images. In the case of the former, internalizing the point of view as proposed above, the photographic disappears in favour of images that have almost no substance, but are pure, undramatic and unfathomable. In the latter case, externalizing the lens, as would be more normal to do, and as has been technically and physically done by the author, these same images become stories that are all too clear, lucid labyrinths to be traversed, to be untangled, geometries that are combined by chance, objects.
Cecilia Luci has also used rubber gloves in her various experimentations. Gloves (which are also used to avoid getting dirty when cleaning among other uses) can be turned inside out, and in turning them inside out you invert left and right hands, left becomes right and vice-versa). If in this all too commonly used object the turning inside out was absolutely instructional and ergonomic, it becomes even more evident that in Cecilia Luci’s case we should talk about a poetic turning inside out of the photographic: I photograph what I am and what I have composed (or that has been composed) and I freeze it in liquid!
Perhaps this action of turning inside out extends to the author who also turns herself inside out. Are these works photographed at the discretion of the author or does their psychological value demand that they be photographed? If we are talking about reversal here, it is clear that this gives rise to reversing not only the inside and the outside, but near and far, past and present.
We have perhaps arrived at the cornerstone of this poetic discourse.
Present and past are defined not as absence and presence, but as present that retraces the past and tries to tie up the loose ends, to tease out the knots in a quite literal sense. A slender subject does not mean a subject indifferent to a history or to itself, but a fragile subject, indifferent to the external view but highly sensitive to the internal one. What is inside is the past that resurfaces to the present, it is what relives the past.
The sense of emptiness around these tenuous signs is not then surface but distance; it is not only a depth (of water) however minimum, but a container, a protection, an intimate theatre which in its entirety becomes the camera. And so finally the reversal of the lens is achieved. It is in the body of the author that the theatre unfolds, in the physical and cerebral, mental and psychological body. Every photograph is not then be a variation on a theme, but a different scene, an additional word, a further act towards the reconstruction of a history, one’s own history.
The shift from one reversal to another brings us to an ordinary and (doubly) clear metaphysics of the no-longer and not-only photographic, which in the case of Cecilia Luci becomes a way of cleaning her memories of nostalgic permanences and surpluses, of filtering them through the pure light of the visible lens, almost making them come to the surface, emerge from the water in order to finally crystallize them.