Joan Teixidor

A black mirror (or Claude mirror) is a small, slightly convex mirror with a tinted surface. These mirrors, kept in small boxes or cases, were used by artists, landscape painters, travellers, and landscape enthusiasts. Their curvature produced the effect of abstracting the portion of the landscape that one wanted to see from everything around it, reducing the scale of the view, and the tint (which was usually sepia or brown) simplified the colour and tonal range of the scene. These instruments were widely used by English landscape painters in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a method for making sketches and colour notes of the landscapes they would later paint. Those who used them adopted a very characteristic posture, as they had to turn their backs to the actual landscape in order to see the image reflected in the mirror as if it were a pre-photographic lens. In Jesús Ferrero's novel El efecto Doppler, a character explains to the protagonist, Darío Dolfos, that Impressionist painters also used them to rest their eyes, exhausted from so much contemplation and study of light. Closing your eyes to see better.
Opacidades by Joan Teixidor is made up of different photograms, that is, photographic images obtained by placing objects on a photosensitive surface and exposing them to direct light without the use of a camera.

The objects on display here are opaque, but reflective like a black mirror. They do not have the seductive power of contemporary brightness, nor its ubiquity, nor are they visible by backlighting. On the contrary, they are made of light fixed on a sensitive surface. Solid images as opposed to the liquidity of screen images. Time images.