LTRL
Ciudad de México
2025
Artista:
Daniel Monroy Cuevas
FOTOFOBIA
Over the past decade, Daniel Monroy Cuevas has explored the relationship between fire and the creation of images. The artist focuses primarily on cinema, reflecting on both the cinematographic act and its methods of production and consumption. These investigations have led him to craft fictions and speculative scenarios that manifest through, among other things, a drawing technique using soot, a by-product of combustion, as a medium for artistic creation.
fotofobia, consisting of two new series, is a visual narrative that begins with the apocryphal notes and reflections of an uncertain narrator—a voice that could even belong to the camera itself—trapped in a forest consumed by flames: a kind of limbo, a desolate space characterized by ambiguous location and temporality. The works presented 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 a regenerative force, one that dictates the rhythm of natural cycles, in contrast to the destructive impact of human activities.
By observing and loosely replicating the abstract textures and sinuous traces of this naturally eroded landscape—responses to fire from various plant species—the exhibition highlights how the searing violence of these conflagrations paves the way for the regeneration of life. Intrigued by the ecology of fire and its role in ecosystems, fotofobia visually and metaphorically engages with the rupture caused by fire’s intrusion into a specific environment, creating a parallel with the cinematic cut.
In his writings, Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein described the cinematic cut as a transition that forces a violent confrontation between images in motion. However, it also fosters organic growth in the development of the montage and its continuous transformation, akin to the division of a cell. The exhibition emphasizes the correspondence between these two events: the regenerative power of fire and the dynamic relationship created by the cinematic cut between images, whose meanings are as diverse as the paths followed by the flames of a blazing fire.