The Mirror’s Ideas 3 & 4

For this series, Iñaki Bonillas decided to work only with images that happen to contain mirrors (the ones shown here were taken from the  J.R. Plaza Archive, but he also used images from other sources). What interested the artist was that those mirrors were not part of the action; they belonged to a background landscape, a diffuse context from which the photographer was largely disengaged and yet, they cast an “image within the image” which seemed to go against, or at least in a different direction from, what was photographed.

In the midst of, say, a domestic scene, a hole opens up that insists on stealing the shot, on directing the spectator’s gaze toward another, invisible place: the garden, for example; the painting that hangs on the famous “fourth wall” (the one occupied by the audience in the theatre); the photographer’s shadow; a tell-tale gaze between lovers, etc. This curious hollow space, through which the mirror speaks, is what inspired the series Las ideas del espejo.

What the artist did was eliminate all the information from the photograph, leaving only the idea of the mirror: the space in which another, fully formed, photographic image is born randomly within the original shot. The artist created then an archive from these little photographs that no one really meant to take, but that were there nonetheless.