Arturo Cuenca

Practical Aesthetic.

Art as part of my aesthetic is a medium. The objective of my work is knowledge. The goal of being is self-awareness: being truth with it self. All of recourses that I have invented in my work have been means to arrive at a knowledge of myself and through me of the spectators that represents the human culture to which I belong.

To discover photography (from the Greek photo= light) as concept was for me as if I melted with this cognitive vision of art through the medium that produce knowledge, light, that joins the object to the subject, which is the seminal relationship in philosophy: that made the principle of what I call my Photosophy.

Photography is the conscience of culture, is an external consciousness assisting our internal conscience in knowing our self: is a para-conscience as are all external instruments from microscopes to telescope, even computer.

Thus, the practice of my work is always photographic: imaginary photographs, be they done with airbrushed painting, in a darkroom or digitally. This is because ultimately all images are photography: a luminous interchange between objects, some of them like in us becoming subjects.

Aesthetic as part of my Photosophy is the body of my work, which is not primarily about art, but a generalized study of internal-essential processes interacting with external (photogenic) phenomena, where light and subject, await. These phenomena are already aesthetics: like mimetic and camouflage in plants and animals. This position breaks with the aesthetic tradition as a generalization a posteriori of the consequences of art. My aesthetic in it universality, creates a new field of ontological investigation which includes all natural and cultural manifestations in addition to being the foundation of a new not only human Ethic but also an ecological one as well.

This Photosophy is expressed in multiples photographic concrete art works by way of practical examples or possibilities of my aesthetic in the real world (art) and this is why I refer to my work as a Practical Aesthetic. In this way, for example, I think ideology as an appearance (aesthetic) of the political power in relation to an economic hidden essence (science) that produce and is distorted by the same power. This is embodied in an actual artwork "Science and Ideology (Che')", by way of a possible visual paradigm.

Arturo Cuenca.