What is an image but survival itself; the evidence that history has the power of making us reflect on our own existence in relation to what its substance reveals. The way Juan Carlos Coppel (Tucson, USA, 1986) constructs the image is by first directing the gaze to himself, and then destabilizing it in a deep concern of imagining the position of the other.

And the otherness in Coppel’s work not only appear in the form of characters, but it also reveals other natures, be they tamed or indomitable. Is the otherness’ position not one’s own? What is at stake in this image-otherness relationship is the very myth of modernity that separates humanity from nature when they are actually part of the same: life and death.

On the other hand, what we cannot see in Coppel’s work, in its absence, is the presence of time. Time in the artist’s oeuvre is understood as self-absorption, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a place where the spectator finds himself facing the immensity of the ineffable and intangible of his own being.

Octavio Avendaño Trujillo – curator