The trap series

Trompe L’Oeil

In the immense multiplicity of images with which we are confronted daily there are represented, almost exclusively, two extreme opposites: success, understood as richness and opulence, and failure, a tragedy culminating in misery. Both models are perceived as separate spheres, unrelated, unconnected, as if one world and the other could not be conceived as a cause and effect. At what cost are we forced to think or choose one in which we prefer to exist and perceive?

Under this panorama, Constanza Piaggio´s photographs force a close weave of the senses that pretend to become tighter in front of our eyes; they stop us from revealing certain devices of deceit. What parallel exists between a young man that seems to assume the contemporary figure of Melancholy atop a slide and a dead rat in a forest made for hunting? The syntaxes proposed in this exhibition, paradoxically renders eloquent different forms that the trap adopts in our society and our contemporary visual culture.

If in the history of art the trompe l’oeil was the technique used to fool the eyes, through techniques of perspective and optics, then photography as a means of representation could crown the search for the illusion of reality. It is not by chance to attribute this concept to the work of Constanza, who was nourished by the history of painting. Her contemporary versions of worldly allegories emerge from the confluence of the careful selection of color schemes, theatrical manipulation of light, and the characters whose pose and posture allude to pictorial compositions. These characters appear suspended in animation in the micro-worlds she creates. Each one appears as a vulnerable, taciturn anti-hero, caught breathless, inexpressive, immobilized before the camera, as trapped by the impossibility to continue with their action.

In the same way as other artists, like Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, or Sharon Lackhart, Constanza works as an art director in a cinematographic production. She chooses each of the elements in the scene as clues for possible dialogues, a visual storytelling mechanism without end. In this sense she constructs images searching a script. Notwithstanding, what is underneath this first series is the dispirit that imbues her characters. We find an affliction of the heart, an uncertain feeling of sadness and unsettlement in Constanza’s personages, we feel it in the letdown at the end of a party, the boredom in an empty playground, the tension in barely sumptuous settings, and in the solitude amongst abundance. As a counterpoint, the image of the devices and camouflaged pathways to hunt small animals underlines the boredom of the contemporary bourgeoisie for having fallen into the lies emanating from their own vanity.

Constanza´s work shows the traps and suggests how to deactivate them. She encourages her viewers to disentangle themselves from the woven illusion before their eyes, to calm the stare, and not become innocent captives of the image.

Viviana Usubiaga