“CLOSED” JOSÉ LUIS SANTALLA 

 

José Luis Santalla has focused his latest series on various aspects that converge in a derived way in an aesthetic of disappearance.

 

Between 1998 and 2001 he made A happy world, proposing a revision of the portrait where the individuality of the human is blurred in the standardized models of mannequins that clone stereotypes between beauty and fashion. Later, between 2002 and 2004, he addresses en Fugas, how the disappearance of the body and the permanence of its traces through clothes, shoes or traces of presence, open up a world that appears abandoned but inhabited by a disturbing invisibility, between desolation and humor.

 

Closed, his most recent series, opens up a perspective in which closed eyes indicate other possibilities of gaze, as a post-psychological alternative to the portrait. It is a portrait that develops in a key of subtraction or disappearance, but that nevertheless enriches the perception of the "I-individual" by presenting photography as the mirror of the impossible.

 

Closed is a series of portraits in which the characters appear half-length, against a uniform background and in relaxed attitudes, but with their eyes closed, facing a reality with the confidence of someone who looks inward.

Is a look with closed eyes possible?

 

We never see ourselves with our eyes closed and that is why photography gives us back in its own gaze the possibility of seeing our blind, impossible image.

 

Open eyes are ready to face the world, to know it and to be known. On the contrary, closed eyes turn us inward, separating us from the world to reconcentrate on everything we have seen before and offer us defenseless to the gaze of others. Those are some moments of extreme fragility but also of absolute intimacy. Intimacy then appears as a fragile, defenseless, delicate time.

 

Closing our eyes we look for the second time, without light, and towards memory. The eyelids hide the eyes when closed, veil the light, but allow the gaze to expand inward.

 

The portrait tends by definition to reveal the psychological elements of the person and the look is the central and essential aspect that serves to define or characterize the model. So is a portrait with closed eyes possible?

 

In the history of art there are very varied examples of "portraits" with closed eyes. In general, the eyelids that hide the eye preferably denote or describe, first of all, death, and then sleep. Undoubtedly also horror, the rapture of martyrdom or mystical ecstasy, but all of this is just one more element in a scene (historical, mythological, religious, etc.): the portrait is reserved for a central gaze that is always open and expressive. .

 

Only in the 19th century, after the romantic and symbolist waves, did some portraits with closed eyes appear, and although in most cases the eyes are only slightly open, the intention to avoid the gaze tends to represent a complete bodily gesture of self-absorption: the eyes embody a reflection of the body, they assume its poses and its movement or immobility.

 

Odilon Redon titles Closed Eyes one of his paintings in 1890, and the title itself seems to be a statement of intentions, which goes beyond novelty towards the exploration of the representation of an emotion or inner vision. As it is not a portrait of a well-known person and it is not mediated by the commission, it rather seems a possible alternative formulation of the portrait against the background of a sensitivity connected with hallucinations, dreams and images of the unconscious.

 

In 1865, Julia Margaret Cameron, made the portrait of "Ellen Terry aged 16", leaning against a wall in a soft backlight, with her head slightly tilted and her eyes half-open, drooping, looking down. Although it is not exactly a portrait with closed eyes, its approach is brutally modern in a context in which the photographic portrait had to express, above all, dignity, or at least a poise that would resist the public sphere. We can think that the idea underlying this photograph is to capture a natural pose of extreme intimacy, an instant in which the camera seems to go unnoticed despite its proximity to the face. By eluding the gaze, the camera introduces us into a strictly private time, which not even a mirror would be able to return. It is the moment that can never be seen, because there are no eyes or gaze in dialogue.

 

Between 2000 and 2002, Pere Formiguera made a series of portraits of people from the Catalan social and cultural world with their eyes closed and gave it a strictly descriptive title Ulls clucs (Eyes Closed ): some 70 black and white photographs of faces that, without the open gaze of the eyes, become forms of concentration or moments of intimate thought. Among the models we recognize the faces of Maria del Mar Bonet, Lluís Llach, Miquel Martí i Pol, Joan Perucho, Pau Riba, Carme Riera, Joaquim Sala Sanahuja or Antoni Tàpies.

 

As if it were about giving another twist and in a very different way, José Luis Santalla undertakes Closed  as a challenge and an exploration of the connotations of the portrait and its psychological possibilities when the model keeps his eyes closed and also the tension is concentrated in the pose of the body. He uses color and the frame collects a half length, against a neutral background, highlighting the connection established between face and body. Neither the eyes nor the face constitute the axis of the portrait: the clothes and the pose of the body establish the rhythm and movement that characterize the person, in circumstances  of extreme expressiveness, (surprisingly) without the presence of the gaze. Perhaps the closed eyes contain the weight of a look that turns towards memory or show the relaxation of a relaxed rest. In some portraits we can sense that the childish game of disappearing if we close our eyes dominates, in others the thought that goes on inside appears without further ado.

 

En Closed the disappearance of gaze and eyes turns the portrait into an architecture of body rhythm and muscle tension. In a certain way it is also an "imagined" portrait, where reality and fiction intertwine, where the clothes establish a generational and epochal journey (all the models belong to the closest personal sphere of José Luis Santalla).

Looking without looking or better yet, looking without eyes is when the body replaces the eyes to define how we position ourselves in the world.

Closed eyes show how the moments of the most absolute intimacy can be. The photos could seem like stolen moments, since neither the camera nor the void is looked at: there is no direct gaze, there is only the photographic gaze as the record of that impossible moment.

 

It is no coincidence that software such as Facial Recognition or the most innovative Blink Shot have been recently developed, which prevents people from taking pictures with their eyes closed on digital cameras.

Closed eyes are another way of looking, differently, in the mirror of the camera.