MIRRORЯOЯЯƎ

Hello. As you are reading these words, I am looking at you. I notice that your face is reversed from left to right. It still remains, for the most part, in balance. 

I reverse directions. I do not speak, but you keep coming back. The moment you stand before me, the act of looking has already begun. Even if what I reflect is only virtual, the act of seeing is real. You never come merely to confirm what you look like - you come to question whether there might still be another possibility. I am a thin boundary that opens into an entire space. I have no depth, yet I carry the gaze of many. A little of today settles upon every face, while every yesterday quietly preserves a tomorrow that can never quite be reached. I witness your vulnerability. I see your eyes linger at the places you wish to change: the scar beside your right eye, the gentle flare of your nostril, the fullness of your lower lip, the subtle texture slowly surfacing on your skin, or the strands of your hair gradually turning white.

I love errors. To me, they never meant failure. They are an opening. Every misalignment, every delay, every left-right reversal opens a passage within a world that has become too resolved. Paradox is much the same. You think you have reached a wall, but I know there has always been a door - it is precisely there that wonder begins to flow endlessly from my other side. 

Your body remains here, while your gaze has already crossed beyond me. Your fingertips touch my surface, but your heart falls behind me. You say that I am only an illusion. And yet, each time you look at me, you have changed a little. It makes me wonder whether you look at other people the way you look into a mirror. Some refuse to believe that an illusion can be real. But what is truly achieved is never the image but the act of looking. The moment your heart is carried toward the place I point to, that place begins to exist.

In Notes on Metamodernism, Robin van den Akker and Timothes Vermeulen describe our generation of artists: gradually moving away from postmodern deconstruction and irony, returning instead to a mode of perception with an ethical dimension. We remain skeptical, still we continue to believe. We know that ideals can never truly be reached, yet we choose to set out anyway. They describe this condition as atopic metaxis - a placeless mode of existence, oscillating between two extremes. To look into a mirror is precisely this kind of oscillatory experience. Your body stands here, while your gaze arrives somewhere else. The image both exists and does not, always half a step behind you, at a distance that can never be reached. 

I, too, have negative space: the parts I do not reflect, the words left unsaid, the gazes that remain upon me long after you have turned away. They have no form, yet they linger longer than your reflection ever could. I exist - these works exist - I speak through these works; to make the familiar unfamiliar again; to restore a sense of solemnity to the ordinary. Within this exhibition, you may find yourself looking as though into a mirror. The works before you are not simply objects to be seen but reflective surfaces through which you encounter what escapes your perception. They may be understood as moments of absence, as forms of negative space, or as the gaps where understanding and feeling momentarily fall out of sync. The focus is not on an exact reflection, but on deviation, difference, and oscillation. Navigating ambiguity and oscillation through the imagined edge of a mirror. In the spirit of metamodern thought, the works unfold in a continuous movement between two poles - between skepticism and hope, reality and fiction, presence and absence.

How far can your gaze reach beyond yourself? If you are willing to see it this way, perhaps you are on this side of the mirror, and at the same time on the other.

Text by Wei Peng • Vera Niess • Gabriel Lobo