DEBORA HIRSCH
The works by Debora Hirsch presented in the exhibition are complementary and the relationship between them is unsettling. The first work, Iconography of silence, consists of two videos, assembledas a diptych. The artist tackles the dramatic theme of abuse of women, choosing a stark language that concedes nothing to rhetoric or the spectacular. In the first video, fragmentary images of violence recorded by CCTV emerge from the rear of the screen. They are frantic for a few instants then give way to disconcertion and silence. In the second, we see little by little, in red letters, the composition of real phrases that have accompanied the violent episodes. The flow of words eventually establishes a texture that pierces the eye. The violence thus finds a voice which the absence of sound characterizing the work renders all the more impactful. The mirror surface of the two screens completes the sense of the piece: observers find their own image there, captured by the video as if to certify the impossibility of their standing aside. Opposite, the large canvas from the Firmamento series has a compensatory effect. The composition is airy and imaginative. Hirsch lays out on the surface of the canvas, very freely, elements derived from Latin visual sensibility. The appearance is deliberately neutral and decorative. The sensation, for the observer, is that this tangle of shapes is hiding a thaumaturgic function, which moderates and counterbalances the evil sealed within the black boxes of the video.
