Through her practice of photography, Guatemalan artist Clara de Tezanos captures light in her camera obscura, finally giving it back its freedom. The leaks of light provide his tree shots with new energy, through a sort of photosynthesis simulating the same biological process by which the vegetal subject of his images feeds on the sun, the source of life.
The camera is too cramped a room for the elusive spectrum of light, and Clara lets it live outdoors in her radiant wall sculptures. The photographic material remains its language, its primary artistic material. It is opened, dismantled, uncovered, exposed and reborn, more photosensitive than ever, as a camera luminosa, which no longer serves to canalyze, but to catalyze divine light, in the form of abstract liturgical candles, ready to receive wishes.
This light is ecumenical; it links the various beliefs of Guatemala, colonial as well as indigenous, whether they were imported by European Christianity in the 16th century, or more ancestral, that of the pré-colombians whose celestial observation pyramids used as receptacles of astral light. Clara's pieces are a contemporary reflection of this, like the artifacts of a photographic civilization that wrote with light, found in a distant future where these objects no longer have their usual fonction, but a poetic and mystical dimension.
The figure of the nest is a comfort, a shelter that filters the light of the world, as much as an invitation to hatch, a promise of life. Because time is running out for all of us...
Light travels at its own speed and seems, to us, to bend time. As the days and nights go by, it revolves around us, and tells us about our finitude. The pré-colombians predicted clairvoyant calendars of the solstices and equinoxes, favorable to sowing and harvesting, and of eclipses, apocalyptic omens. Light therefore carries within it life and its end, the flight of time being immanent in it.
Clara's sundials seem to project the shadows of before, the flashes of now and the shimmer of the after, and accompany us in this permanent revolution of light, in a perpetual movement that we have desperately attempted, with our devices, to freeze. These new instruments compose radiant music that calls us to dance in time with the radiation, to embrace its movement; to make peace with the old, to live in the moment and to make a wish for the future.