One can only give examples of it

'One can only give examples of it' draws on a neologism coined by cubist, Dadaist and conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968): the infrathin (from the French term inframince); a notion with no conceptual definition that –as he said in an interview in 1945– can only be explained by examples of it, like ‘the warmth of a seat which has just been left’, ‘the difference between two forms cast from the same mold’, or ‘when the tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth which exhales it’. Ideas that, alongside other examples from his notes, reveal a sensibility towards the subtle differences that movement, the passage of time, dimension and state shifts, repetitions, or non-visible physical sensations create.

Through a series of still and moving images produced with a minimal equipment mostly in France and Iceland, I have translated to visual representations not only some of Duchamp’s infrathin examples, but my own ones; trying to fill the gap caused by the impossibility of definition by inscribing those vague –and sometimes barely perceptible– energies. The aim of doing so has made me reflect on experience and perception from a different point of view and to relate with the medium itself in a different way: focusing not on the object, but its trace or projection; on the absence and not the presence; not on what it is, but what is about to happen or is almost gone; on the difference between each repetition, movement or replica; and also on what exists only as a possibility – that of two hands too close that almost graze.

The nature of this project has entailed the culmination of a progressive emptying and simplifying process, whereby I have hieratically reduced the photographs to its most essential quality –being in some cases mere gestures, light traces or color fields.