Fabiola Torres-Alzaga

La Nao presents Retratos de una escena incompleta (Portraits of an Incomplete Scene) by artist Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, curated by Dorothée Dupuis.

Since its beginnings, Fabiola Torres-Alzaga's work, through drawing, sculpture, installation, moving image and photography, has astonished by the apparent versatility of its objects of study: first salon magic and its desirable deception, then the baroque and the unconfessable secrets of its scarlet curtains, and more recently, censorship in post-war cinema, whose containment accompanied the most emancipating decade of the 20th century, that of the 1960s. The exhibition Portraits of an Incomplete Scene is an opportunity to continue to understand Torres-Alzaga's work as an example of the power of a certain phenomenology of dissidence, as theorized for the last two decades by queer theory as applied to the field of contemporary art. The out-of-frame, the insert as wound, the artificial light born of drawing, the set photography and the model act as plastic and aesthetic commentaries on cinema and its regime of hypervisuality as a tool of power. Disregarding the frontality of the screen, even as they surrender to it, the works suggest that there may be a marginal path within hegemony, one that escapes violence through appropriation and play. Likewise, the exhibition does not seek to denounce or portray a particular community, but rather to make us feel in our own flesh, through the works, that there can be a marginal path within the hegemony that escapes violence through appropriation and play. Likewise, the exhibition does not seek to denounce or portray a particular community, but rather to make us feel in our own flesh, through the specific techniques of art, what it is to want to live, by chance or by choice, in an incomplete scene –not because it lacks something, but because in the corner that is not well distinguished lies an irreducible freedom.

—Dorotheé Dupuis