Belén Serrano: Absence Looks

Photographer Belén Serrano’s Absence Looks (Miradas de Ausencia) display is set to be opened on December 18 at Madrid’s Alcobendas Art Center.

Greek philosopher Plato asserted that «our senses don’t mislead us», what we see is just the shadow of the world of ideas. Belén Serrano’s magnificent work is an empirical demonstration of this philosophic theory. It might be a paradox because the work of a photographer like her is perceived by the rest of us through our eyes, but that’s where we meet the second section of the platonic theory in which he said that the emotion, sensibility and poetry can help us to distinguish what we see, between the shadows and the reality.

Every single element in artist Belén Serrano’s work has that poetic touch, that sensibility she uses to watch, to choose the right timing, the moment, the place. She has traveled around the world to develop her work, and she has frozen the time of some lives that are not related to us, but they exist. She usually takes pictures of the faces of marginality, but they are not the ones living apart from the world, we are, we stand behind the sweetened parapet we have built to defend ourselves from our bad conscience. They look at us, we believe they can’t see us and yet they can feel us, and they hope to receive from us what life has not given to them.

The paradox of Absence looks (Miradas de Ausencia) lies in the fact that, through the approach selected by the photographer, we stand in a world that takes us just as we are, naked and without any costume, with the power of emotion.

Manuel Francisco Reina