LTRL
Ciudad de México
2025
Artista:
Daniel Monroy Cuevas
FOTOFOBIA
Over the last decade, Daniel Monroy Cuevas has probed into the relationship between fire and the creation of images. The artist focuses mainly on cinema, reflecting on the cinematographic act and its forms of production and consumption. These inquiries have led him to construct fictions and speculative scenarios that have become tangible through, among others, a drawing technique that uses soot, a by-product of combustion, as an instrument of artistic production.
Consisting of two new series, fotofobia is a visual narrative that takes as its starting point the apocryphal notes and reflections of an uncertain narrator –a voice that could even be that of the camera itself– trapped in a forest that's been engulfed by flames: a limbo of sorts, a desolate space seeped in an ambiguous location and temporality. The featured artworks have been created through the contact of smoke with glass screens –impressions of the tangible remains of light– and are inspired by forest fires as an engine of regeneration, which marks the rhythm of natural cycles, as opposed to a devastating effect of human activities.
By observing and loosely replicating the abstract textures and sinuous traces of this naturally eroded territory, which emerge as adaptive responses to fire by different plant species, the exhibition shows how the scorching violence of these conflagrations allows for the regrowth of life. Intrigued by the ecology of fire, which is the relationship between this natural element and ecosystems, fotofobia visually and metaphorically addresses a break that marks the irruption of fire in a specific environment, creating a parallelism with the cinematic cut.
Among his many writings, Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein stated that the cinematic cut is a transition that sets a violent confrontation between images in motion. Still, since it allows for organic growth in the development of a montage and its continuous transformation, it also resembles the division of a cell. Thus, the exhibition emphasizes a correspondence between both events: the regenerative power of fire and the dynamic relationship established by the cinematic cut between images, whose meanings are as diverse as the directions followed by the flames of a blazing fire.