Bathtubs

Three of the four projections share the colors that make up white light — according to the additive model known as RGB (red, green, blue), which is used in photography and in electronic systems — and they each project the same image eighty times over; only the tone changes from one slide to the next. One complete projection cycle allows the image to go from one saturated primary color to its opposite (the expression of the absolute lack of the original color), in an equally saturated state: from blue to yellow, red to cyan, and green to magenta.

The fourth projection offers eighty repetitions of this same photograph of a cloud that passed between the sun and the camera of J. R. Plaza somewhere in Baja California in August 1982. This time, the image surfaces little by little out of total darkness, then gradually vanishes into an imperious whiteness.

The four projections are synchronized, and right in the middle of these permutations of color and saturation, of each group of eighty slides, the same image—the original, or rather four identical copies of it—makes a momentary appearance.

Bañeras takes its title from the natural bathtubs often to be found scooped out of the rock along the sea shore, and where, during low tide, water is trapped and sits, becoming tepid.