Image, in pursuit of the sublime
Mylene Zozaya Tinoco.
Text by Héctor Fabián García
“Image, in pursuit of the sublime”, is an exhibition that ponders on the aesthetic dilemma of the immediacy of contemporary image production, which currently seems to displace the moment of the sublime to focus solely on the beautiful, thus tearing apart the aesthetic reflection that is developed through technique and the technical-analytical faculty, which the artist develops when trying to capture a transcendent image.
Displacing the conservative positions on the necessary use of a professional camera, this exhibition unfolds the question: can we consider the sublime in a digital photograph taken by a cell phone? Furthermore, the show invites viewers to add their own points of view.
Rethinking the image in digital terms allows us to reflect in a different way the perception of visual capture; the eye and the lens of a cell phone are now devices that project new forms of appreciation, ranging from the abstract to the concrete.
The search for the sublime in this body of work is itself a redemptive act in terms of symbolic restoration of the classical, it is a symbolic return to philosophical reflection. And as Leo Strauss would affirm, it is at the same time an act of repentance: Repentance is return, meaning the return from the wrong path to the right path.
But like every act of vindication, this act of redemption becomes in itself a deliberately political act, just as every exercise of contrast always generates conflict. Every epistemic and, in this case, aesthetic conflict is a dialectical exercise, struggling to survive in the face of the critique of modern art to the current day.