This essay revolves around the defamiliarization of the image insofar as entelechy^[1] that willful bars univocal visuality. The operations of a form are observed as that form withdraws from itself in order to recognize itself in a seamless splitting driven by what its creator, Elena Loson, effects. The practice of the image undergoes a range of experiments around its multiple projections. It strives to inhabit its lines, its folds, its latencies, as well as a thought, an exertion, a specter. The image is a method geared toward the apparition of its privileged instants, instants that have found in the gallery of Hache the medium of their actualization.

The gallery is envisioned as the phantasmatic double of the studio. In it, what the artist calls “moments of nonexistence”occur. It symbolizes the experience of solitary perception, sudden revelation, the memory of a work—all those specific events that happen when the producer meddles in and explores the crystals of form. The space is a sort of memorial device that eternalizes Elena’s self-portrait, that is, each and every one of her abstract images. 

Together, the works in Oscuro sobre sí interrogate materiality as signifying specificity, placing darkness and light at the crux of the conversation. The works gathered here forge steadfast awareness of a device characterized by repetition and seriality, a device enmeshed in the experimentation of a brief and precise corpus: graphite powder, tracing paper, graphite-infused ink, and Prussian-blue ink sometimes saturated until near blackness. The essence of the image and its subtle variations are understood by means of a cyclical and structural act. The image—the act of appearing—stands as vital rhythm that marks the intimate relationship between matter and body—trace of a direct gesture of the pulse here and now. Oscuro sobre sí is the fissure to a possible fiction or the nascent dimension of when vision goes astray and spirit goes quiet.

Malena Souto Arena.

^[1] The word entelechy comes from the Greek ἐντελέχεια (entelékheia ), a combination of enteles (‘complete”), telos (“end,” “purpose”), and echein (‘to have”). Coined by Aristotle, entelechy could be translated as “to have an end in itself.” Entelechy names a type of existence where the being or the thing—that is, the material or immaterial, concrete or abstract, entity—actively works in and on itself: It pursues an end. Through entelechy, the object or subject understands its potentialities and, as such, discovers perfection. Perfection does not mean the maximum expression of its particular traits, but rather the pursuit of the attributes that harbor its singularity, the ones to which it is naturally inclined.

Cast light
Think a form
The mind of the form
Fold-skin
In silence or the possible image of all images
The possible suspended
The possible and the spontaneous
Drawing, a line in time
Drawing in eclipse
Draw, occupy a territory
The horizon that shifts in the drawing
A horizon that shifts in the image
No one is foreign to their own image
An abyss too close
The crystal of memory
What renders particular
Engraving surface
Calls worth (its) absence
A blue border
Someone will look
Nighttime, crowning void
Never turned off, darkness
The image ceases: matter
The universe might be finite
Dream in blue and gray
And the other dark blues
Bringing out nothing
On itself
Dark on itself.

Fragments of the correspondence between Elena Loson & Malena Souto Arena that began in July 2022.