The Annunciation

The paintings of the annunciation illustrate a scene that comes from, and alludes to, faith; they have a well-defined context, a historical moment and specific intermediary, identifiable characters that look silent, but it is well known what they are saying to each other at the feet of their invisible director and screenwriter. Well-known as well, are the absent characters affected outside the scene, all of which are at the service of an Idea, a Doctrine, the intermediary as well as the painter. The notion of “order” achieved, with a similar fervor of “truth”. In a different space, Luis Gonzalez Palma places his re-elaborations of a contemporary annunciation. In these color photographs, there is also a loving and invisible ghost that denotes power, where real persons act a script with an everyday language, but without really explaining themselves. As a fragment of a script that narrates the encounter of a couple, but already with the distance of perceiving the other, who now becomes an allegorical mental image of what was said.

Palma makes his images, I give them a text; both objects  could do without the other, but when they combine, they give a certain frame to the experience of living together; the other, the pleasure and the  fear of it, as subjects of thought. 

We are at that point where our personal history needs to break old patterns, where we need to ask ourselves new questions regarding not only losses, but emotional capitalisation, the need for autonomy, examining that emptiness that precedes us before we can talk. To open ourselves to communication and propose a dialogue from our experience of children who have not lived in the homeland of their previous generation. Children of rootless parents. We, the inheritors of this in-culture, even inhabiting a new emotional place, have not allowed ourselves a personal re-elaboration, to set the lighting on the table to see ourselves. With the necessary distance of observation, the annunciation can provide us with attempts and real instruments to see our cultural myths in the other and in the self. In the cycle of order and disorder, we live as social individuals created from the magic and the visions of our ancestors, and, as creative subjects, we displace the poetics of contemporary reality to our individuality. 

-Graciela De Oliveira