The Shadow and the Flash

In 1945, J.R. Plaza decided to travel from Mexico City to Rock Springs, in southwestern Wyoming, to work as a shepherd. His stay there was short because he found the realities of ranching on the high plains rather less appealing than they had seemed in the Western movies that he liked so much. During those four months he kept a diary, and he poured into it all his continually mounting frustration. Curiously enough, after returning to Mexico he took several pictures of himself portraying the life of his dream cowboy: John Wayne.

For A sombra e o brilho — a title that refers to the Jack London story “The Shadow and the Flash,” that concerns two childhood rivals who as adults compete to discover the secret to invisibility — Bonillas made negative prints of these photographs as Kodaliths (a film that is no longer made), to display them mounted on small light boxes and to exhibit them together with extracts from Plaza’s tormented diary, transcribed here as typewritten pages.

The convergence of these two elements — diary and photographs — from the J.R. Plaza archive allows the artist to comment on the contrast between fantasy and reality. And, here, the order is indeed important: Plaza didn’t photograph himself leading an idealized life only to discover later on that the reality of his dream was much less idyllic. It was the other way around: Plaza first found out that the cowboy life was really terrible and then he tried to cover up this knowledge with his fantasy. As Henri Bosco wrote, “Next to the weighty past of my true existence, subject to the fatalities of matter, with one breath I made a past blossom that lived up to my inner desires.”

What we see is not a simple staging, a parody of the daily life of a cowboy. Rather, we have before us a subtle exercise in the reconstruction of the past — or that is how the artist presents it: a man takes portraits of himself obsessively, in which he is living the life that he would have whished for himself. It is an open defense of our imaginative condition represented, like in London’s story, by two different ways of approaching invisibility: a literal escape through space to a life in the American West and an escape into the image, a disappearance into the cowboy archetype.