Silver Leticia Ramos
Leticia Ramos presents Silver, a body of work occupying one room at Casa Iramaia that investigates light’s trajectory in relation to material surfaces, landscapes, and cosmic panoramas. In these works, Ramos draws on darkroom and cameraless resources to stage an encounter between technical apparatuses and contingency, producing images that operate between spectral presence and material inscription. Luminous compositions negotiate tensions between visibility and darkness, functioning as schemas that challenge representational paradigms and reflecting the artist’s concern with the still underexplored possibilities at the intersection of art and science. Her practice unfolds through longterm projects that share a strong affinity with experimental filmmaking – in the use of material substrate, optical qualities, and an attention to duration, staging, and the sequencing of events. These investigations, articulated as interconnected series, are the outcome of meticulous experimentation and ongoing research conducted in her São Paulo studio.
Across scratched surfaces, beams of light emerge as intrusions or furtive subjects within the photographic field. The works elevate detailed yet elemental operations – cutting, pasting, scratching – turning them into deformations of photographic convention. Embracing the challenges of analogue processes, the artist transforms technical indeterminacy into creative potency. Ramos describes her process as “a reflection” on what happens in the studio, where each work simultaneously carries “a force” and exists “within a certain precarity of analogue special effects.” Her research treats contingency as both limitation and possibility.
“Each photograph in the exhibition is produced in a different way, but they all originate in the analog photography lab,” the artist explains. “The photosensitive paper contains a silver surface fixed in gelatin that covers the entire sheet. When this silver is exposed to light, it oxidizes and darkens.” The works employ diverse techniques: from Silver, with its constructed negatives forming shadow compositions, to White Noise, generated by the mathematical trajectory of a gravity driven light pendulum, and Riscos, which merges projection with direct intervention. These are cameraless, oneofakind photographs, constructed in a manner akin to drawing, using light and shadow to create these environments. Collectively, the works examine light’s path in both space and photography.
Thinking of her practice as “fictitious and impossible landscapes” in constant construction – literally inscribed through physical contact – Ramos questions the historical authority of the technical image and exposes its stilluntapped potential. Recurrent horizon motifs suggest territories that oscillate between empirical documentation and psychic projection, where methodical procedures meet the sometimes explosive force of artistic speculation.
