The performative light drawings in space by artist Júlia Ventura gives photography an unexpected vitality, as if it is a kind of self-animation, almost cinematic, where the image seems to breathe and move on its own. Light ceases to be merely a technical element and becomes an expressive medium — both represented and representing. It is also through light that communication is established between the artist’s body and the viewer’s gaze — a material presence essential to the visual experience.
In this process, light takes on an ambiguous role: it reveals and conceals, constructs and dissolves, in a cadence that approaches a visual choreography in which drawing acquires a lived and bodily expression. This gesture thus inscribes itself in a territory between photography, cinema, and performance, challenging the traditional boundaries of the still image.
In this sense, the artist proposes a perceptual experience in constant transformation, where the visible becomes ephemeral and the invisible gains tangible density. These works, belonging to the series Untitled (FLPB#) and dating from 1977, lead us to question the value of the image and the portrait, and to an action that gives rise to a rhythmic dialectic in which the result is a visual field that reconfigures itself at every moment. The viewer, in turn, is invited to a physical and active contemplation of light as a potential and metamorphic matter.

Carolina Quintela