Ariadna Arnés is a photographer, or rather she was: now she dedicates herself mainly to what she calls "ficciographies," that is, AI-generated images with a photographic appearance and imagined content. As she likes to live "Dalianly," as if hanging by a thread between reality and fiction, the possible and the impossible, she finds the middle ground in the improbable and feels creatively at ease.
In this case, she has been invited by the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya to develop AI-generated images from its vast photographic archive. The result, in feminine, is of a present and tangible improbability: iconic women, sometimes everyday, sometimes mythological, who star in dreamlike scenes with natural (or sports) landscapes in the background. A new reality created, interpreted, put through the washing machine (or the noisy) dishwasher of this pioneer of digital graphic discipline. Behind the artificiality of AI, sometimes there is intelligence.
The exhibition is highly recommended, hung on the walls of the reception of this historic building remodeled by Lluís Domènech i Montaner and where, before the columns of the Temple of Augustus were exhibited in a courtyard with display cases that read "Patria, Libertad y Fe" (Homeland, Liberty, and Faith), they penetrated into the center's assembly hall and were popularly called "El Milagro" (The Miracle).
Just as the men of the Renaixença and Modernism adapted the Roman past to the modern needs of the moment, linking the columns with the present and the future instead of having them caged in a private room, Ariadna Arnés takes a photo of a tennis player at the Lawn-Tennis Club Barcelona (which was not yet real or anything) and turns her into a woman without a face but with an elegant summer outfit who improbably carries a fried egg in a frying pan/racket. Similarly, with this existential vertigo of Arnés, the girl who dives into the water a century ago from a springboard is now a woman who doesn't quite dive but who has already dived, dressed and with her hair blown forward, as if the true leap were always spiritual and never simply recreational.
This hanging by a thread is maintained throughout the exhibition, along with the author's constant recourse to the cloud on the head or in the hair (as in the hiker in Sant Maurici) or the invitation to change perspective (like the sea and sky transformed into sky and sea, that is, inverted, during the scene of the woman with a red parasol). Arnés's women always dress well, they are pure and immaculate, they come from the fifties and the first color televisions, or they develop a natural (and unnatural) mermaid tail when it comes to swimming in Barceloneta. Even Aurora Bertrana deserves an interpretation, in the photograph of her taken on the beaches of Garraf, which Arnés transforms into an erased face following the linear trace of the horizon and the coast.
"Cracks of possibility", the renowned photographer calls all this. Dream, desire, possibility, parallel dimension, a drift of a realistic and at the same time surreal story. A bridge between memory and fiction, between history and what history could have been. Skiing women, girls on a sled twinned by their braids, the mountains of Aigüestortes transformed into a woman's skirt with the inevitable cloud on her head (and if not, to go further, a turtle on her head in what had been an Asian hat).
An exhibition that, without developing fluid, reveals the true message of the portraitist: it is not reality, it is the eye. It is not the diaphragm or the camera button, it is the retina. It is not technique, it is love, which is where imagination comes from with the essential objective of surpassing reality. No, reality will never surpass fiction. That is why we invent fiction, precisely: to surpass ourselves and to propose other probable paths.