THE HAND (In the Red Cave)

A tribute to our anonymous ancestor artists. Celebrating 30.000 years of aesthetic experiences.(This is just a resume. Please take a look at the complete series of 'THE HAND - In the Red Cave' and the book in my website www.robertofernandez.com.uy)

THE HAND (In the Red Cave)

As long as technology is producing more and more sophisticated instruments for making images, there is an increasing gap between Photography and the origins of artistic expression.

I want to make an homage to our ancestors like a ritual in my darkroom (my red cave), and doing so I want to celebrate thousands of years of creativity and joy in communities and societies, when all their members were active participants in the aesthetic experience of painting in their caves walls, and repeatedly making prints of their own hands.

Perhaps we’ll never know the reasons hidden beneath those fantastic primeval paintings, the behavior and the state of mind that carried those artists to leave their drawings and handprints in places where the light didn’t come in, some of them in the farthest depths of the caves. “We once were, and we were here”, those paintings seem to tell us.

I want empathy to be the vehicle of such approach, making it as direct as I can.

My sincerest way of making a photographic homage to my ancestor is by working with the hands, as he did, and sharing my moments of creation with friends and peers. In this ritual / celebration/ feast, the cave is my darkroom; the rock walls, the surface of the photographic paper; the flame, I carried it with me. While working, my hand stays in contact with a permeable, subtle Silver veil that connects me with the past, taking me to the origins of my search: the endless territory of imagination.

And as I see the silhouette of my hand materializing under the magic light of a simple flame, I think it’s also the same hand that trembled thirty thousand years ago by the emotion of being an image of its own action.

Roberto Fernández Ibáñez

2015-2016

Technique: Camera-less B&W Silver Gelatin chemically handmade prints, unique pieces