2025
<p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">There is a scene in </span><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Las Meninas</em><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> that Josefina López's work seems to have inherited as a working method: Velázquez paints himself painting, and in the mirror at the back appear the king and queen — the true addressees of the scene — precisely where the viewer should be standing. The one who looks ends up inside the painting. That displacement — standing at the edge of what is observed and, without meaning to, becoming part of the composition — is exactly the territory in which </span><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Arte y parte</em><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> moves. The project grows out of a personal archive built over decades of visits spent photographing museums, galleries, fairs, and biennials.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">From the ambivalent position of someone who observes the art world while also belonging to it, Josefina López turns her gaze toward the peripheral scenes, the rituals and contradictions that give life to art spaces. What interests her is not really the works themselves: it is everything surrounding them and making them possible — the installation, the devotion of those who hang the pictures, of those who admire and covet them, the money that circulates without showing itself, the waiting, the involuntary gesture that reveals what is hidden, and the small absurdities of a system that takes itself very seriously.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Here lies the project's central gesture: every photograph documenting the art system is, at the same time, an aesthetic decision. Josefina selects, frames, orders; she places her attention on details most people never see. In doing so she does not merely analyze the art ecosystem — she transforms it, aestheticizes it, turns it into work. And in that movement — from observer to author, from witness to artist — she herself becomes part of the system she portrays. As Susan Sontag wrote, to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed; here, appropriating the art world is also the way Josefina inscribes herself within it.</span></p><p><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Arte y parte</em><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> portrays, or reveals, that ambivalence — being inside and outside at once, being a specialist and being an artist, tending the system and also exhibiting it — and sustains it as form. The result is a visual composition of relationships as personal as they are political, seen by someone who never stops asking from which part of the mirror she is looking. </span></p><p><br></p><p>Text by Catalina Mena</p><p><br></p>
