Abstraction; Back and Forth

As I think, I abstract myself...

As I feel, I abstract myself...

As I believe, I abstract myself...

And every now and then, I come back...

- Monica Gro Mouret -

This series of photographs done by the Mexican photographer, Monica Gro Mouret invites us to travel. It doesn’t present landscapes you haven’t seen. Neither does it show people you haven’t met. Nor traditional costumes you haven’t touched. It is a journey into abstraction, a journey back and forth from this visual realm.

Monica has been concentrating on capturing close up images of plants, watery surfaces, and soap bubbles with an objective in mind: that future viewers will start to concentrate on lines and colors in objects while forgetting the object’s original form. In other words, it is a focus on form and not content, which thus explains the series title “Abstrayendome”.

As time is being put aside, it is space on which the emphasis is put on. The visual space from far to close, from recognizable to unrecognizable, from figurative to abstract is being put in motion. As you observe the recognizable, slowly unknown lines begin to appear, lines and shapes you didn’t notice at first but that are now unmistakably present. It is a focal movement that makes the viewer linger on details that he may not have seen before, but that are now strongly apparent. 

Grass stops being grass; it becomes lines of a incandescent green, all intertwined. Reflections on water stop being reflections; they become pencil-thin lines without any shape in particular and with no other purpose than the one of being there for themselves. It all becomes lines of different width, spots of different size and different chromatic intensity, and everything else is forgotten. 

Truly, Monica Gro Mouret has sought to take the viewer into abstraction, to create a focal movement from fore-ground to back-ground and back again, showing that these close-up images reveal details about elements that otherwise could not be perceived. Rhythms, parallels appear between the different stems of the cactus and improvisation, uncertainty on the water’s surface. 

This kind of work enables us to see the chromatic beauty and richness of shapes that lie in nature. In this way, objects such as cactus stems can be appreciated for their lines and colors and not for what they represent.

Etienne Bolze