Juan Caros ortiz, In Praise of The Shadows -影を称えて- (PLACES 2022)

"At least since Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we have seen shadows as a metaphor for the illusory and evil aspects of life, of what we must eradicate in order to illuminate the truth and inherent goodness of existence. And yet, we forget that darkness evidences light, palpable evidence without which we would not be able to appreciate or even notice the brightness itself." Today the ideal of beauty is dominant and is often presented as perfection, symmetry and balanced colors. There is no room for flaw. Nowhere is this bias toward the obvious more evident than on social media, where the use of image enhancement software is ubiquitous. To share an image or a moment, it must first be perfect. But in the Japanese tradition, beauty seems more suggestive. The imperfection is not hidden, it is part of the balance in the whole to achieve a perfect harmony. This fact manifests itself in many aspects of Japanese aesthetics, such as Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by reassembling broken areas with lacquer dusted or mixed with gold powder. As a philosophy, it treats breaks and repairs as part of an object's history, rather than something to be disguised. Something similar is found in traditional architecture -still present to this day- where the existence of darkness, or shadow, suggests the existence of tranquility. Not suppressing the darkness, allowing the presence of the shadow next to the light, suggests harmony. One without the other cannot exist. It can be seen everywhere, even in Japanese house design today, where the use of small windows creates diffused and suppressed interior light. A reminder of the way Japanese ancestors lived hundreds of years ago in dark dwellings surrounded by shadows, sheltered from the harsh Japanese sun. With this body of work "In Praise of Shadows" I have tried to reflect this concept of the contrast between light and shadow and the importance of imperfection in achieving beauty in everyday life, not only in Japan but also in our lives. "A faint golden ray, cast into the surrounding darkness, like the bright line of the horizon at sunset... I don't think gold shows its sad beauty more splendidly elsewhere." Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1933

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.