ENRIQUE ROTTENBERG

PHOTOGRAPHIC 

WORK

The photographic work of Enrique Rottenberg may be considered controversial, satirical, manic-melancholic, shameless, empathic, alarming...The reasons behind the attraction that it causes, whether it be of allure or tension, laughter or pain, surprise or rejection, beauty or horror, are diverse, but they all seem to be gathered in a certain way under Schelling’s definition of the term: the disturbing oddness - the ominous (unheimlich): “(...) everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden, has come to light.” But yet, everything that seems obvious and familiar becomes paradoxical and borderline absurd. Perhaps Rottenberg’s photography as an unsuspecting heir of the film imagery, tries to represent timeless and motionless scenes, stunned characters, suspended environments, frozen stories, as if each and every one of them were shocked from suddenly coming to light, while remaining irremediably suspended. But this is the face-surface that is capable of opening towards another movement and another time, unknown, unusual, disjunctive: the other scene – the fantasy, and the other side of reality. There’s a certain movement that never ceases to reveal itself in Rottenberg’s work, repeated and distressing, building its multiple layers, which go from the farcical to the edge of reality, from oneiric shadows to the brutal light of the vigil, from self-narcissism to mass psychology, from finding a way out at any price, all the way to encountering the irreconcilable. In these provocations there’s a struggle, away of resisting. Resisting the orders and those who dictate, but also the dominated and defeated; the gods, the myths, the mimicry and consensus, but to some instance of resisting to destiny itself, to all the established and pre-established destinies, even that off finiteness and the indecipherable meaning of life? But Rottenberg is a born storyteller, perhaps because stories area necessity of life, unlike in death. He is also a destroyer of mirages. He has the ability to afflict the subject, until he reveals some invisible, strange place within himself. The looks of his portraits are incisive, painful, powerful, and at the end of that open crack primary helplessness looms. In his compositions he uses eloquent backgrounds, as if what is behind the scene were the undertone of their meaning and their senselessness. Rottenberg’s language is paradoxical, hence that feeling of surprise and perplexity: on one side he’s directly affective unwilling tore-create metaphors;his images are screams, sometimes deaf and others strident, onomatopoeias, moans, silences. Indeed, it seems the desire to recreate metaphors is absent; they make themselves and are imposed at a later time, like the poetry of the mundane. The disruption of the compositional syntax, the variety of colors used, the exposed textures, the bluntness, are what create a “style”, and at the limit, an enigma. A wandering language without a home land, of an identity that escapes from the identical, always becoming: becoming-man, becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-mass, becoming-another...