Felipe Cama

FELIPE CAMA – BY victor stirnimann

Where does the communicative power of all language come from? What is the relationship between power and communication? Every form of communication contains an illusory component, because it is also always a form of trickery, magic, propaganda. The illusionary component there is not necessarily evil, nor an obstacle to be overcome. It is simply there. And it is in this illusion that the possibility of language resides. The medium (be it photography, painting, video, advertising) generates the message, but only because it represents a technical possibility of deception, a deception that generates a stimulating product according to the laws of phenomenology of our perception.

For example, how are the erotic photographs that daily clog our digital mailboxes produced, distributed and consumed? At no stage of this cycle do these images ever materialize, except in the form of electrical impulses. A photograph that has never been or will become a photograph. A photograph that never materializes physically. They are like studies of nudes in the digital age, reduced to their simplest condition, equivalent to the silver grain in photographic paper: their own binary code.

The reverse way takes the painted nudes, circulating on the internet in the form of digitized jpg images on museums, galleries and auction houses websites and newsletters. It leaves the original canvas and ink physical materiality to become pure digital information. And in this format, also reduced to pixels, also flattened in the form of binary codes and stripped of the aura of the work of art, these classic oils of art history are mistaken for those prosaic pornographic photos.

By comparing the different ways in which the same painting by Van Gogh is represented in different books, diaries, postcards, calendars and posters, Cama investigates the relationship between meaning and signifier. The same painting, represented in different publications, appears in different formats, textures, hues, crops. Which one is the original one, or rather, which one most resembles the original one? Those who see the reproductions can only choose their truth from the options presented. Just as we choose to read the daily news in one newspaper or not in another, or choose one religion over another. There is no escape: our choice will always be for a version, for a truth necessarily mediated, one among others. This "truth" will always have reference in another, and this in another, and so on. The medium shapes the way we perceive things and consequently how we form our opinion about them.

And how can one not perceive the language bias if, when advertising fake luxury objects, these photos exert the same fascination and attraction as the original products? How then to value the counterfeit object and its original? The value is attributed in this case by the image, by the language of the photograph. And from there, other issues arise, such as the market value of art versus its aesthetic value. How does one price an art work after all?

Felipe Cama's work then feeds on the contrast and emptiness between different languages/perspectives, but always juxtaposed: between binarism and eroticism, between visual pollution and silence, between political ethics and the dissolution of time, between the consumerism and veneration. All united by the same secret that also separates them: the fact that the human eye always sees more or less, depending on what it previously decides to see. 

Victor Stirnimann (philosopher and psychotherapist), 2004.