Photography, as an aesthetic discipline, is perhaps one of the most complex visual languages, as it responds to the needs of creation, documentation, and permanence. From a technical standpoint, its complexity is mystified by achieving what once seemed like a fairy tale or witchcraft: fixing the ephemeral, containing in a fragment of light the totality of a time that no longer exists. At no point is the purpose of photography as an artistic branch merely to reproduce the visible world, since through the camera as an instrument, the artist interprets, questions, and reorders it.
The photographic tradition is a ritual that condenses the liturgy of the event: the gesture, the gaze, the fleeting moment in transit. No other medium has managed to transform experience into evidence with such a degree of symbolic precision; it is the most objective and ephemeral medium, the luminous inscription of that which was, is no more, but always will be.
The works gathered in Duque Arango Contemporáneo comprise a visual sequence that honors the technical materiality of photography; in them, the modern and the analog coexist with the external and the intimate in a process reminiscent of the Impressionists in their desire to capture not the object itself, but the atmospheric vibration that envelops it and the meaning that constitutes it. Daniel Estrada unfolds a broad pictorial register through four series that allow us to contemplate the study of movement, form, and the translation of light into tangible matter, offering us a photographic exhibition as a perceptual experience, as a painting made of time.
In The Dance of the Spanish Horse, the artist examines the equestrian body through the elegance of dressage: every muscle, every line of tension, is revealed in a composition that alternates between formal precision and lyricism. There is an echo of Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of movement, as well as a Baroque interpretation of the body in tension, closer to the drama of Goya or the sculptural dynamism of Marino Marini.
In Paseíllo de embestidas (Ride of Charges), Estrada takes that energy to a more intense territory: the body in a trance, the imminence of the collision. Here, chiaroscuro is used as the discursive axis of the image. This technique, heir to the Renaissance tradition, becomes a language that uses light as a structural element, not describing, but sculpting. The atmosphere becomes the protagonist at the moment it reveals and accentuates the intention of the gesture; the composition strips the scene bare, and what at first glance seems like absence is, in reality, the condition of possibility for the image.
In Malabar, a disruptive shift occurs that fractures the exhibition’s overall language. The rupture begins when the image detaches itself from figurative narrative to become geometric abstraction, constructing a visual syntax closer to thought than to representation. This gesture engages with a long tradition of geometric art in Latin America, where pure form, rhythm, and structure have been understood as means of aesthetic emancipation and self-knowledge, placing the artist and their work within a framework of subjectivity and interpretation.
Finally, Camino al paraíso marks a turning point. The animal figure dissolves into the landscape, and the movement ignites spirituality. The printing technique on cotton paper creates a subtle texture that suggests distance, memory, and lightness. In this ethereal series, the gaze is softened by abrupt movements frozen in the frame.
The technical rigor and formal coherence that run through these series do not seek aesthetic perfection, but rather conceptual clarity; the precision of the shot, the choice of materials, and the artist’s very vision are simply vehicles for a meditation on the act of looking itself. Therefore, it is not inaccurate to argue that artistic photography, more than a trace of reality, is a reconstruction of the experience of time.
Verónica Hoyos Giraldo
