Series 04 – Onnis Luque

Documentation Museo Tamayo

Closing One’s Eyes

“The punctum eludes immediate perception. It matures slowly within the space of the imagination, which unfolds when we close our eyes. In that space, secret correspondences are established between things. The language of the punctum is a dreamlike protocol of the imagination.”
 — Byung-Chul Han

There are photographers whose primary concern lies in composition—in meticulously framing an image to portray a space in a certain way. For them, the building is often the subject, approached as a discrete object. Others are drawn to documenting use—capturing the traces and imprints left by human occupation. In their images, architecture becomes the backdrop for the drama of everyday life, with people as protagonists.

Yet there exists another kind of photographer—defined not by compositional precision nor documentary intent, but by a deep sensitivity to the subjective and elusive nature of perception itself. This rara avis accepts the impossibility of capturing the full volume or essence of architectural experience—rooted as it is in space, time, and sensation. Onnis Luque belongs to this third group.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes photography as composed of two elements: studium and punctum. Studium refers to context, knowledge, and cultural understanding—things that can be planned, studied, and analyzed. It is where order and intention reside. Punctum, on the other hand, is what pierces—it is unexpected, affective, intimate. “It is like a sting, a speck, a cut, a little hole—and it pierces me,” Barthes writes. Punctum unsettles; it moves the viewer. Where studium invites analysis, punctum insists on feeling.

Byung-Chul Han expands on this idea, calling punctum an “asceticism of seeing.” It is not loud or immediate. It “guards the secret,” he writes. It endures beyond meaning and representation—it is bodily, material, affective, unconscious—a residue that sings softly and stays with us. It resists the symbolic; it is the real.

There is a fundamental difference between constructing a scene (studium) and capturing an emotional resonance (punctum). In this sense, Onnis Luque does not attempt to document the building—he knows the futility of that task. Instead, he aims to register his experience of the place. His photographs are not illustrations; they are mirrors—fragments through which each viewer might reconstruct, through the lens of imagination, a specific and intimate spatial memory.

Luque is not interested in showing us the texture of the building alone, but in capturing the texture of the present—ephemeral, unstable, visceral. His gaze invites us into the deeper strata of perception. His photographs do not freeze moments; they stretch them, open them, and allow them to resonate. Through them, we approach what might be called a second innocence—a kind of seeing that forgets what it thinks it knows.

Luque understands that Museo Tamayo reveals itself through light and diagonals. His project is situated precisely at their intersection. Light becomes a navigational chart; diagonals, a path. His images do not describe the museum—they indicate, point, and suggest. They guide us toward a possible re-creation of the building, in time and in memory.

To close one’s eyes, even for a moment, and ask:
Have the secret correspondences his images evoke been inscribed in us?
Can we sense how the dreamlike protocol of imagination begins to unfold?

Juan José Vergara Newton in conversation with Luis Aldrete.