Galerie Hubert Winter

Vanitas or the Masks of a Creative Development
Claudia Weinzierl — EIKON 2011 Nr. 73 S. 32-36. 2011

Looking at Vanitas, the latest series of photographs by Colombian-born Barcelona artist Laura Ribero, one is gripped almost immediately by a feeling of complete rigidity that lets the heart go cold. On the surface, the series restages in complete mimesis one of the most well-known art motifs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which holds up mirror humankind`s vanity and recalls its fugacity and pointlessness. This impression is consciously underscored by motivic details as well as the figure of the beautiful woman in a baroque, luxuriously museum-like scene that is free of all traces of being lived in. On first glance, even the woman seems without any trace of life, but this is only appearance.
And this, too, plays with an aspect of the vanitas motif: the so-called mise en abyme, an image that contains itself, a mirroring that can be simple or endless. In Laura Ribero`s work, this reflection already appears in using the self-timer to capture the photographic moment showing a self-reflective mirroring into the spatial motifs, whereas she increasingly objectifies herself, that is , subjects herself, either by fulfilling the literal meaning of the term “subject”, standing alongside or opposite things or almost disappearing in them (as in the series Monasterium or The Queen), lending them a literal importance through her own irrelevance. It is left up in the air whether this is a critique of dominant relations, in which we are subject to the reification of the world by way of consumption and alienation, ourselves becoming more and more a “thing”, or an arabesque of media theory.

The question of which self is serially reflected here by staging itself but remaining absent as a fixed identity remains open. It is reminiscent of the crisis of the self that had become virulent at the turn of the last century, which since then has multiplied in an inexorable stream of perception of artistic and artificial potential ego-conceptions in various media. To this extent, Laura Ribero stands in a modern-artistic tradition, but already points beyond its limits by having the “self” appear as “masquerades of the inner exterior” (Franz Kafka) and reflecting on the question of identity both toward the inside and toward the outside. What she experiences as “external” life experience as someone at home in various cultures, she cleverly and poetically links to the politically so virulent issue of “foreignness”. By using herself both as a figure and as a contingent self, she enters into relations with herself and the other(s), reflecting the constant interpenetration of co-existence until it is reflected in current media-philosophical approaches: “A relationship to myself as I was different.” This is the sought-out formula: A relation and/or relations to ourselves as well as to the many others represents the simple condition of the social, but in a special way the basic condition of cultural life itself. Things that have been resonate with their essences. My own having been is exactly that, “being an other”. The others that are my contemporaries represent me in my shares of otherness (share holders). (1)
That Laura Ribero almost seamlessly succeeds in staging these theo-rems of a current media philosophy attests to a perfect intelligible as well as technological strategy that shows an apparent revelation in a consciously enigmatic way. This recurs as a quasi-iconographic motif throughout the work of the young artist, and in the most recent series has condensed in such a way that it recalls the state of pupation – the perfect, that is, closed moment of a development. This young artist can be trusted, no, it is veritably palpable, that she emerges from these “having beens”, something unexpected, new, essentially other.
An event can be predicted, a bursting from the shell form which a fullness of living possibilities pours forth. It seems as if something wanted to appear, wherein a joyful becoming aware of the nomadic self as a potential. A move to the open – into winged and inspiring spatial communities. If not all is deceiving, a fine, almost invisible smile seems to point towards the last images…

(1) Elisabeth von Samsonow, Egon Schiele: Ich bin die Vielen (Vienna, 2010), 23.