Encounters brings together the work of Carlos Herraiz and Lena Laguna Diel through a shared inquiry into the life cycle of the image. Working from the surface as a point of departure, both artists engage with processes that unfold in opposite yet deeply connected directions.
In Lena’s practice, the image emerges. Through painting, drawing, and ceramic work, the surface becomes a site where the image gradually takes form, adhering through gesture, repetition, and accumulation. In contrast, Carlos approaches the image as something that withdraws. In his works, the photographic surface is subjected to time and exposure, causing the image to crack, fade, and ultimately detach. Rather than appearing, it dissolves. The image veils itself.
This tension between revelation and disappearance suggests a cyclical condition. The image comes into being, intensifies, and eventually erodes, returning to a state of blankness from which it may begin again. Within this cycle, surface is not static but a field of transformation, where presence and absence continuously negotiate.
Underlying this dialogue is a reflection on language and communication. Both artists draw from personal experiences marked by the limits of expression: the difficulty of inhabiting a foreign language, the fracture of speech, and the weight of silence. Their works point toward what cannot be fully articulated, to the invisible layers that exist between bodies, between words, between images.
In Encounters, the image is not fixed but unstable, shaped by time, perception, and the act of looking. What appears is inseparable from what disappears, and meaning resides precisely in that fragile, shifting space in between.