Qualities of Time
Felipe Scovino
Practically one single object is the common element between all the works presented in this exhibition. It is a highly representative element, but not necessarily indispensable, much less identified by its aesthetic value. What it marks, points, registers and informs is undoubtedly necessary and vital. It is through a transposition of place and (aesthetic) function, without leaving aside their representation, that the clock hands are offered to the spectators as possibilities to revert, stretch, retard and subvert the one they have always served without ever complaining. The clock hands, imbued with the aesthetic function attributed to them by the artist, assume the role of presenting new orders of time when they constitute themselves and disappear, accumulating and superimposing themselves to be extinguished moments later. They have no specific methods or purposes. They do not mark time, but passages. They measure what is unexpected of them, that is, they are in the territory of imprecision and nonsense. This system can be expanded by associating the idea of (de)construction of Lenora's work with the duration of the phenomenology. This time, that is constantly shattered and recreated in the expanded horizon of Lenora's work, connects with the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty, who states that the individual who looks does not determine what he is seeing, since his gaze gets carried away by the destructuring of its field of perception, which introduces the advent of the corporeality of things - that is no longer different from its essence. It is in the possibility of shaping time and making its invisibility apparent that once again both thoughts (of the philosopher and the artist) touch each other. If the clock hands completely assume their visuality in the videos, in Nebulae (2010/11) they adopt a sort of camouflage, a doubt about their state of appearance and function.The delicacy and singleness remain, but they cease being time stamps to assume a state of silence. It is as if Lenora's work reached a maximum degree in this process of "breaking time.” There is nothing left (to time) but its silence. However, Lenora is not talking about an end, but the possibility of reflecting on the confluences and similarities between the (supposed) nothingness and, let’s say, a chronological temporality. There are, therefore, no ambivalences but phenomena, apparitions or qualities of time.
In Lenora's work everything is in a constant movement (transversal, alternate and non-linear), even when she operates with writing, as in Time Forecast (2008). We have not read what we expected to, and we remain in doubt about what is announced. The form and the title create a nominative and phenomenological association that revolves between doubt, pretension and what is to come. States and memories that we have not yet experienced or felt are, however, announced as certainties. They are ambiguous titles because they can be understood as being emptied of images at the same time that they trigger the opposite of that. The paths are multiple: there is no starting or ending point. The space is demarcated but at the same time it is flow. It is in the clash between spectator/reader and work that this visual poetry dedicates itself to the continuous formation of new landscapes, readings, associations, criteria — pointing to a resonant and virtual surface. Its power is to be an object in transit and, therefore, to expose the imprecision in which time is immersed. The work seems to say: there is no possibility of foreseeing time, except through fiction.
Another circumstance in which words appear is in the harmonious dialogue between How much time the time has (2008) and For ever and ever (2010). Words as sound and visual record. A remake, through verbal games (the first work was a partnership between the artist and her mother, and addresses a jocular element regarding a lyrical and childhood memory), of a state of transitory time, whose movement does not cease and multiplies its possibility in its action. Lenora's work does not let us forget that time is a constantly accomplished and achievable project. Time is a process of exchanges, mergers and transformations that are perhaps irrelevant to ordinary experience, but for the artistic experience they constitute a way of participation and ecstasy with the world. Another formal aspect connects Time Forecast and How much time the time has: the scenic element. If in the first work the setting conveys an idea of mystery and imprecision about time, place and matter of that image (it seems that anything that could be obvious and judged by its appearance no longer interests the artist), in the second work the installation creates a quite reflective exercise about the intimate quality that time can come to possess. And, in both cases, we see the appearance of an economic repertoire of gestures and methods that further qualify the power of the word as an object in its dialogue visual arts.