Project Overview
Early Works gathers together a constellation of photographic experiments that, while not conceived as part of a unified project, already contain in nuce the essential traits of a research trajectory that will later unfold with increasing conceptual and technical refinement. These images function retrospectively as a matrix—an origin point from which a highly personal visual system begins to emerge.
At the time of their making, these photographs were not bound to a specific framework. Rather, they reflect an intuitive urgency to probe the threshold between the visible and the intelligible. What binds them is not subject matter but method: an early, instinctive attempt to subvert the conventions of photographic transparency by treating the image as a site of construction—material, optical, and conceptual.
Even in their earliest form, the core strategies are already present. Optical filters, often handmade and embedded with physical irregularities, introduce chromatic aberrations and distortions that prefigure a later systematic departure from human perceptual norms. Chromatic algorithms—designed not to correct but to alter the camera’s response to light—begin to loosen the bond between referent and representation. Backdrops, far from being neutral supports, are meticulously hand-painted using techniques developed through trial and error, forming visual fields that oscillate between abstraction and illusion. These backgrounds act not as stage design but as perceptual devices—zones of affective interference that blur the distinction between figure and ground, subject and context.
In some cases, the attire worn by the subjects is likewise conceived to participate in this strategy of displacement. The image is no longer about what is seen, but about how vision itself is constructed—and potentially dismantled.
Importantly, the human figures that populate these photographs are not intended to convey narrative or biographical meaning; rather, they act as a visual compass, allowing us to reconcile what we see with what we know to be real. Therefore their function is not to be depicted, but to trigger a perceptual condition, to offer a visible anchor from which the image can begin to detach. The resulting photographs do not aim to represent, but to question the very act of representation. They point to a space of indeterminacy where observation becomes entangled with its own mechanisms of projection and failure.
Already here, then, the image ceases to be a window onto the world and becomes instead a speculative device: a hypothesis posed to the eye. What appears is not what is; and what is, may never fully appear. The notion of photography as evidence collapses in favor of a paradigm in which the photograph becomes an index of what escapes perception, an imprint of phenomena that exist independently of our capacity to register them coherently.
This latent philosophical orientation—toward uncertainty, toward the limits of knowledge and the failures of vision—is what gives Early Works its singular character. The series does not merely announce a style or aesthetic; it articulates the early coordinates of a deeper epistemological inquiry. The photographs, while visually autonomous, resonate as fragments of a larger, yet-to-be-formalized system: one that seeks to construct a non-human mode of vision capable of revealing the real as something inherently unstable, elusive, and mediated.
In this sense, Early Works should not be read as a collection of beginnings, but as a field of prototypes—visual artifacts from a process that has only just begun to understand itself. Their importance lies not in their completeness, but in their capacity to illuminate the conditions of a question that will, over time, be articulated with increasing conceptual and technical clarity: what does it mean to see, and what, in fact, can be seen?
