Vanessa Pey

The author freezes the moving image by selecting different frames from a video capture. In this case, stopping time means creating a new time for the images. The tools available to contemporary photographers have expanded beyond the camera. Scanners, screenshots, video recordings, the reinterpretation of archives and the manipulation of digital code are the new avenues of exploration for their eyes.

In her series, Beating Paths, five panel images that function as five screens show us a ghostly approximation of the portrait of the individual. We see a celebration of the glitch, the pixel, the blurriness. There is a lack of temporal and visual anchorage, which makes them disturbing and delirious, almost erotic portraits. Continuing with the celebratory line, it is as if the artist were looking for a way to sensualise the pixel and ambiguity, to enhance their importance and poetic fervour. These fiery and explosive portraits could also be considered pop tributes to a kind of archetype (or deity) of distortion. We see a figure empowered by its distortion. Liquidity is freedom, and the subject of the portraits has it. Neocorporealities and new understandings of gender are also based on the beauty of the queer, which unintentionally breaks with normativity and stability, opting instead for the transient and mutant. The figure is transmuted by the filters and layers with which the artist plays, avoiding existential stillness and, therefore, formal accuracy; in affective or identity terms, the figure could be anyone, opening up space for the insertion of the audience, another layer of eroticism. The artist wants us to kinkily slip into the esoteric, pixelated skin of the figure she presents.

Our identity, our aura emerges when the emphasis is not on our literal visuality, but when it becomes an ambiguous and pixelated mirage. Pey captures and choreographs these fleeting moments, in which facial details and emphasis on gender disappear, and we see the visceral skeleton that underpins us.