Entre Planos is the first solo exhibition of Andrea Franco in VIGIL GONZALES, curated by Argentinean curator and researcher Sebastián Vidal Mackinson.
ENTRE PLANOS
By Sebastián Vidal Mackinson
A set of color images placed in the hall and corridor, a large print that leads to a film projected in one of the gallery rooms. Single frames and images in motion: a diversity of formats creating connections with the viewers.
Entre Planos brings together the premiere of the film Notes III accompanied by printed single frames from Notes I, Notes II and Notes III. Viewers can expect to be immersed in the contemplation of images that appeal to intimacy and seek to stop the turmoil of time.
This set of works comprises Entre planos and, at the same time, is part of an ongoing work by Andrea Franco called Notes on Connection. This includes a series of films, a multi-channel installation, photographs and a book. Together, they stage images of parallel worlds in which frontiers are dissolved in order to create representations of the intangible connections we share with the environment.
Entre planos is also a research on film language and its syntactic processes, both on the projected and the real space, on the narrative resources, and their ability for audiovisual enticement. At the same time, Entre planos focuses on nature and landscape as portals where the Pacific Ocean appears as a key element, especially the coastlines of Perú, southern California and Baja, Mexico. The works gathered here are reflexive explorations on a diversity of places that approach nature and the importance of recovering ancient spiritual traditions as a new way of understanding the environment.
We can also recognise in these works a fusion of cultural ancient American and judaic kabbalistic heritage, showing multiple, simultaneous realities based on worldviews that have a certain relation to the environment, nature and time which differs from that of western culture. Notes III is an immersive video installation that longs to work as a portal between the beaches of Tijuana, Mexico and Ancón, Peru. Both locations were filmed in 16mm and Mini DV, recreating a dreamlike state that interconnects the coast town from Peru with the beaches at the border between the USA and Mexico. This film will also be simultaneously projected in NettNett (a cultural production agency and community based in Tijuana) as another step in Franco’s quest for structuring this portal as an energetic device in space and time.
These oniric, immersive and narrative lines are presented as planes of reality, as astral projections of the mind, where ephemeral and evanescent states are accommodated by in-between spaces, by a liminal state where selected film frames serve to fix specific places. By capturing moving images and transferring them into an objectual state, Franco seeks to place a portal between two dimensions.