A photograph is always an X-ray. Intentionally or not, each shot portrays the person who takes it from within. It is not a matter of technique or chance; but rather it is the essence of the very act of looking. Marisa Culatto executes her gaze in a complex but nevertheless simple manner. She shows with total honesty that which she believes she sees. And it is this honesty in the fundamental act of looking (and looking at oneself) which makes her photographs transitive in the linguistic sense, which is: capable of incorporating subject, object and action.
When Culatto’s lens makes the journey there and back, which constitutes her photographs, (looking outwards and then back inwards) it does not actually travel or dis-locate. Nor is she so self-absorbed to be unable to open up to otherness, but rather that she is compelled to return. After all, it is only the eye which is capable of creating reality. This double mechanism, like that of the Allegory of the Cave, presents us with an artist who lives in contented chaos with this technical extension of herself: the camera. Thus this camera obscura, ambidextrous, and prosthetic, has been, for quite some time, irremediably a constituent part of Marisa Culatto, making it impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.
The Ponds (or reservoirs) in this series are a mirage. In every possible sense. The stones, water, mosses or lichens are there, and at the same time, not there (although they always do exist). They constitute an exercise in objectual refraction, a game of mirrors. Because they are not what they seem. They are landscapes without territory. Without land. Without place. They are psychological landscapes. Scopic projections and reflections of the interior: states of mind, found thoughts, pleasures or pains on their return journey. The system of elements, of opposites, complementaries or supplementaries of these Ponds, points at and describes the human psychological state. Not just Marisa Culatto’s - which it does - but that of anyone, because the artist - even without meaning to - always speaks for all of us.
On examining this series closely, an unavoidable perception emerges: that the material we encounter in these Ponds has attained what is referred to in contemporary physics as critical mass. A point at which elements self-activate. A new level of existence where they emerge in an autonomous system, self-organized, their state and functions transformed. Managing, through this emancipation, to turn the inert into narration; otherness into self; and to make stagnant waters become beautiful.
Against the cultural axiom of the fast and the immediate that tries to install the fixity of life in movement, Culatto fixes the movement of life in the stillness... And it is from this territory that she extracts beauty. Or even, in a Hegelian sense, the Sublime. Once again against the current, Culatto confronts the abandoning of the search for beauty which the art-establishment-dressed-in-black propagates to the four winds, reminding us of the extra-ordinary nature of art.
Transgressing the current tendency for documentary photography, this series constitutes a remarkable exercise in resistance. To silence and to fashion, but above all to the cultural myopia in which we are placidly installed. This is not testimonial photography, nor singular, nor even concrete; it is shared experience. It is silent and tacit complicity with the eye that observes.
Abraham San Pedro
