Luisa Lambri

Fundación RAC (Pontevedra, Spain)
Luisa Lambri

For someone who photographs architecture, Luisa Lambri’s pictures show a distinct universe of the photographed object. The chiaroscuro transcends a personal identity. Her images tend to a poetic expression revealing an apparent sensual reality, where we can find Lambri’s persona in the photographed spaces rather than their architects’.

At the historical centre of Pontevedra, and in a restored house that has been transformed into an exhibition according to contemporary art conveniences and necessities, eleven medium size black & white photographs compose different groups referring to architectural buildings, such as Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela), or Casa Serralves (Porto).

Within each construction context, each picture resembles to the former, but with a tiny difference, that is barely visible, and differentiates it from the previous photograph. The images shown at Fundación RAC capture a world – a wall, windows and a corner in the ceiling –, where Luisa Lambri changes the camera position, the angle, or the captured light, almost as imperceptible, in distinctive moments in time. In some, the intensity of luminosity is so affecting that the object blurs into the paper’s whiteness, disentangling it from constrains derived from its own objectification.

However, Lambri’s concerns are about time. She does not document the architect or even has a vision about the architect’s spatial perspective. It is something else, a sort of “dislocation”. She is interested in how shadows and light disturb usually organized places, creating an, almost, cinematographic register. Her photographs are works about perception.

Luisa Lambri photos refer back to geometric abstraction, and to the confluence between that geometrical abstraction and nature. A discourse on the use of light and shadows to achieve a sense of volume when modelling three-dimensional objects. The objects perceived play between geometry and the curves of the human body, between the relations in proportions and surfaces with nature.

They question the landscape, the female body, the figure, the curve – that is nature –, and the relative arrangements of the parts of something – geometry.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXVIII, Núm. 253 (93), April 2009 España © Luisa Lambri, "Untitled (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, #08)", 2008