«Mariana Sarraute also feels a predilection for hard-to-read images. This is how her process begins to constitute a secret, hidden language, which she uses with certain objectives such as investigating the optical perception when observing a painting and the elements that come into play in the said observation. (…) »
Cristina Ramos – Mirando el ver.
In Screenshots, Sarraute extends bridges between the screen of her computer and the physical space, between the pictorial language and the digital code, between the physical process of painting and the virtuality of light colour. Sarraute enjoys hard-to-read encoded languages and images: programming codes, binary codes, kabbalistic codes, pictorial codes, information codes, …
The Screenshot title refers to the image as a shot on a virtual image. The surface is captured by projecting a color plane, we could say that it has the connotation of a dream catcher: it is the desire to catch a virtual image that you don’t really have; it is the image of an image, almost presented as if it were a sample made with a magnifying glass; it is a game of captured and projected realities, where the format is not the limit and where the different times are compressed into one.
As in other series, the iconography and the iconographic is still present but, in this case, it is in the brushstroke itself, which generates an almost modular icon: The multiple eyes of previous works are simplified and become curved lines, which are characters. Decodex / Screenshots is the result of refining and polishing the reference shapes, where the lines of the shapes become Image Builder Codes. The key to this process is that the artist is emptying herself, to build from that emptiness the reality of the paintings.
In Screenshots the artist continues the zoom process initiated in other series on the image. In this process of inquiry the artist has blurred and carried out a de-construction of her referent images (alchemical allegories, Tarot cards, apocalyptic Romanesque murals, alchemical sheets, etc …). Now the figuration disappears, expressing itself in a CODIFIED pictorial language; We could say that Sarraute expresses herself in this work as a programmer who paints, or a painter who programs.