LIGA 13: Diego Arraigada (Arg). Looking in, Looking Out
Photography: Luis Gallardo
We need to be outside in order to look inside, just as to look outside we need to be inside. Both of these actions entail a displacement. It may be physical or conceptual, but the movement must take place: as a concrete fact or intellectual factor; a real or imaginary journey in order to perceive the other; a journey in order to see oneself from another place. To look at our own house we need to stand on the opposite sidewalk. In the same way as when we travel somewhere we gain enough distance to see what we have left behind with greater clarity, so too can distant things be observed and understood better from our current position.
Why does someone looking at something for the first time see more than a person who looks at it all the time? In order to understand what surrounds us, to see the context of our exploits, it is essential to preserve the attitude of this original observer, the one who looks without prejudice, an observer whose gaze passes uniformly over each detail of the object without discriminating between what is important and what is banal.
The simultaneous simplicity and complexity of the work of Diego Arraigada seems to find an explanation in this constancy, on the basis of an action that fluctuates between these two positions: between the near and the far, the profound and the anodyne, the local and the foreign, the specific and the universal. It focuses and blurs the gaze and understands what is to hand from far away, and what is foreign from close by. All this occurs intellectually in this intermediate space that, like a real or imaginary tunnel, links both worlds, coming and going, taking and bringing, tirelessly, from here to there, and from there to here.
