Look slowly
Jaime Conde-Salazar, continuumlivearts.com
[…] Chus Domínguez films are a good time to get nervous. Although everything seems to propose is deeply tinged with a strange calm and pleasant. The camera does not move, the frame is stable, no sound effects nor intoxicating music. Only the image that unfolds before us, and immediately, the certainty that one is looking. But again, if we give in and persevere, we reward. These films are not going to provide the expected dose of anesthetic. Perhaps because, beyond what appears on the screen, its subject, its substance is the look itself.
Chus Domínguez behaves as a kind of architect who knows that the framework is the cornerstone of his building. Raising a point of view is like building a space, both tasks will end up defining a vision: those who get into the screening room, will see what the camera will offer, and, accordingly, we’ll be and embody the person who sees those things. In this sense, Chus Domínguez films make clear a performative process that makes that, in front of the screen, we build ourselves a look, as a particular subjectivity. What you see in the film becomes more or less accidental and incidental, the important thing is the place it locates you who remain seated in the darkness of the room. The proposal would be something like “you look this way, then you will see just what you finish seeing.” Clearly, what is special about these films is “the way” of looking they propose: that place that Chus Domínguez builds is made of calm and confidence. It is to observe, to take the time to see, for the world been revealed. It is not that the daring filmmaker has been able to cause and capture extraordinary moments and show them to us. He simply let things happen and is aware of that’s happening. And that’s where the show is redefined: it is not using increasingly sophisticated technologies that will lead to a pleasant state of anesthesia, but being able to be fascinated by the things that happen in the world constantly. It’s about how you look. The show is rather the promise that the world is going to reveal and will provide us with images capable of making ourselves understand. Trucks, sheep, river, light from the street are epiphanies. And Chus Domínguez films create the building so that we receive them. Once the lesson is learned, it’s just go out, stop and let the world do wonderful things.