Revista Lapiz
November 2006 Edition Nº 227


Richard Mosse in La Caja Blanca

Reviews
Piedad Solans (Translation by Laura F. Farhall)



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project in la caja blanca (2007)
exhibition press release (pdf document)

In Minima Moralia Theodor W. Adorno said: "The contradiction between what is made and what exists is the vital element of art and encompasses the law of its development; however, it is also its misery." Art cannot elude its "reason," and the more the artistic object approaches mass production, the more this issue arises. "Yet works of art," says Adorno, "try to silence it."

The beauty of Richard Mosse's photographs is enclosed in the core of their contradiction: they show horror, ruin, war. Yet what emerges from the camera after a technical and selective process is not what is real, but an attractive product, that is commercially and industrially perfect and arouses in the viewers the (morally masked) emotion of beauty. Romanticism was aware of this and contemporary art did not forget about it; Mario Perniola called it the "idiocy and splendour of modern art." However, Mosse does not seem to hide it, noting the failed impotence of representation when searching for symmetry with reality, similitude with the object. Like a reporter, journalist or member of an NGO, he tries to portray suffering, war conflicts, disasters caused by injustice, in a journey through cities destroyed by the war, in Bosnia, Ramallah, Beirut or Kosovo, or devastated by catastrophes, in Iran or Pakistan.

The result is images that fascinate and amaze the viewers with their mystery and beauty: an aesthetic product.

Mosse's first solo exhibition in Spain also includes two videos, Yani Intifada (2005) and Jew on a Ball (2006), which are structured as television interviews with youths from Palestine and Israel and, as a result, come up against the impossibility -that appears in the action of the man that constantly falls off the ball- of media language to stimulate the energy of affection, the difficulty of transmission and communication in a world dominated by images, although it is, in reality, subjected to the basic instances of love and death.