Un Hueco en el Sol - The Introduction

translated by Jeeronie/VFB

...about Viggo

Viggo Mortensen, was born in Manhattan in 1958, the eldest of three brothers. In Cuba and maybe in the whole world, noone knows for sure who Viggo Mortensen is, even though the most intimate and profound of his being has been exposed innumerable times to the eyes of the curious, experts or non-experts. Books have been published in which it was given to the people the inside of Mortensen, his fantasies, his dreams, his experiences.

Many, like myself now, have written about him; about his poetry, his paintings or his photographs, but noone knows him. The only opportunity that we have of knowing him is now, in this moment, facing his work -- one minute later, tomorrow, he will be a perfect stranger just like everyone else. All we will know is what was said about him and nothing more.

Today we can see his being in some of his photos, perhaps the most in the abstract ones.

...about the photography

Every time we look at an abstract photo in which apparently "nothing is happening", we face an image which potentially contains every action, every message. Our tireless interpreting work drives us, and we make these images fit into a story, we force them to confess what they hide, our fantasies. Just a few hints make the experiences of the photographer who has seized these images flood us. So, through this imprecise language the communication becomes perfect, there is no need for words, because the images are there, and it is not necessary to explain anything. Everything has been said directly through the beauty, that traps the mind behind the eye -- not understanding but held prisoner nonetheless.

...about the photography and Viggo

Each photo itself is a footprint, not of the photographed event but of the look which was set on that particular happening. This footprint becomes a sign and a symbol, even anticipating a language, that does not try to convince with the literality of its transparence, but which hides an impenetrable depth, like the one of memory, behind its simplicity. Some have arrived at abstraction by reducing the verbal content which is hidden behind each recognizable image, until they reached forms free from any language content and articulate story, searching for the beauty of the pure forms and the perfection inherent to the lack of inexpression and the silence of meditation, which are connected to the abstract images. Paradoxically, both those who have tried to liberate the image from the weight of verbal interpretation beneath the inexpression and those who have done it looking for a direct and sensitive expression have arrived at the same unsettling formal results. The photography always accompanied by that strong flavor of reality, is revealed to us in these works by Viggo, full of suspicions, of suppositions, communicating intentions, of long and innumerable stories which we can not know, but can not stop ourselves from assuming.

We stop facing a predominantly blue image, our sight runs through the surface of the wall textured by the passing of time, the horizontal plane slowly rotates, bends until it reaches verticality. How long has it been? How many times has the light shone in this same surface? How much life has gone through it, around it, inside it? In our memory, the experiences are perhaps stored as in an old library, shelf after shelf, pieces and pieces of images, sounds, sensations that may achieve a meaning, but which are at the same time like loose pieces of a puzzle, from which we can picture all nostalgies.

These are some of the traces that might compose our image of Viggo, we can peek and venture a last look at his world, his photos, and at least seize what we can see, against the light across this "hole in the sun". When we return we will believe that we know him and we will talk of him, tell his stories (our stories) like we are telling the life of a friend.

Nelson Ramirez de Arellano
Principal specialist of the Fototeca de Cuba, La Habana