Escoto + Carrara
Escoto + Carrara (Roberto Escoto and Federico Carrara) have been working for over a decade at the intersection of photography and painting to reimagine the portrait — with special attention to the feminine universe — within domestic spaces laden with ornamentation. Their chromatic research de-realizes the scene: it inverts palettes, solarizes, and displaces color to the point of making it a threshold between wakefulness and dream. Thus, seemingly everyday images open up to the unsettling and the dreamlike, revealing the ambivalence of the home as a place of intimacy, fantasy, and, at times, tension. The process is a frontal dialogue between mediums: the digital capture coexists with technological manipulation and meticulous translation into oil painting, without hierarchies or submissions. From this pulse emerges a figuration that oscillates between the classical and the contemporary; between pop visual culture and a silent dramaturgy that invites the viewer to complete the gaps with their own experience. In their “cromatonírico” use of color —the emotional nerve of the work— the duo proposes a ritual of gaze: inhabiting the “divine everydayness” and its paradoxes, where the familiar becomes strangeness and the portrait, rather than identity, is a field of possibilities.
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Chromatoniric
The inversion of color in the work of Escoto + Carrara transports us to alternative perceptual realms, with colors transmuted and enhanced by entering other worlds or new ways of seeing our world. Is that not what every work of art should aspire to? Without the need to resort to substances that alter our nervous system, the images before us in this exhibition lead us to certain moments of calm that we sometimes find ourselves in: hypnagogic states, daydreams, or situations of isolation and rest, moments when sleep and wakefulness mix, introducing sounds or images from our surroundings into the scenes our mind creates while we sleep. We lose the notion of time and space, we don't know who is really around us or from where they are speaking to us, and in that sensation we sometimes find the peace that we don't have when our consciousness governs our actions and thoughts.
