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Luis Mallo lives and works in
the liminal spaces of the exile and the expatriate, and, not
coincidentally, in the obscure and shadowy realm where art and
description meet. His pictures are confident and curious but
always a little slippery. He shows us what he sees and we see
it too, but we are never quite sure why he has asked us to look
in just such a way, or whether the emotions evoked by this looking
are ours, his, or someone else's, and we do not know whether
either the emotion or the vision is true.
The pictures of In Camera
are straightforward and consistent in tone, palette, subject,
and composition but they are also emotionally ambiguous and
mysteriously intense. Each horizontal rectangle frames a vista:
an empty street, a construction site, a building undergoing
demolition--- and each vista is obscured by a physical barrier:
a fence, a screen, a scrim, a rain-smeared window or a fabric
blind that offer translucent glimpses of what is behind it or
rigid gridlike abstractions that deconstruct the already fragmented
whole they cover into tiny multiple compositions of form that
inexplicably become their own meaning. To compound this layered
study of looking, in many cases, Mallo's scrim is parted, his
fabric is torn, and his fences are constructed with interstices
so that shards and slivers of a single evidentiary layer, almost
shocking in their immediacy, glow ambiguously within the folds,
vines, sticks, shadows and smears that simultaneously, hide,
isolate, define, reveal and mask them. Looking at these pictures
is a complex act. They are photographs after all, unaltered
and directly descriptive.
Alison Nordstrom
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