Langan’s new works presented at the Galeria Cadaqués Dos, The Flooded Rooms and Metamorphosis – with music by the composer Jürgen Simposon – show a certain continuity with the previous trilogy (1999-2002). In The Flooded Rooms, the lenses distort and overlight a series of empty, waterlogged rooms in a house of austere walls and uncertain age. Metamorphosis is a chain of three themes: the city under the effects of wind and snow, the interior of a house in which silent flakes fall, and naked nature showing all its implacable force; snow-capped mountains, the raging sea. In these works, we can guess Clare Langan’s aesthetic and spiritual preferences: between heaven and hell, opposing chimeras, she opts for a limbo that is both physical and symbolic. But if there is one thing that is difficult to map, it is limbo. The space between the border and the beyond. Physics and metaphysics have their doctors; the inner look at the essence of the gaze itself, the foreign body in its subject, disguised as either sublime or sinister, surfs on the back of the dreamlike, withot a north. La física y la metafísica tienen sus doctores; la mirada interior a la esencia de la propia mirada, el cuerpo extraño en su sujeto, disfrazado de sublime o de siniestro, navega a lomos de lo onírico, de lo antinatural. Without concessions to digital effects, as if trying to decipher the visual writing of an astigmatic, with hand-coloured filters, filming the projection, diverting the course of the signifier, Langan’s unbridled natures, projected in an impossible Plato’s cave, transmute pain into aesthetics, experience into false memory, glacial cold, eternal wind or suffocating heat into a plot vanishing point. There are no interiors and no landscapes, the question in cinema is not so much how or where or who, but when. And the manipulation of tempo and montage allow us to glimpse his work as a reversible alchemy or hermeneutics. Just as a good painting is as good upside down as it is inside out, its projections can be viewed in multiple directions. Langan’s space-time is the loop: in a Moebius strip it is as important to go here as it is to go there. Settling into pain to the point of insensitivity, to the point of comfort, is as ethical an option as its complementary.
Notifications