* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia
I contemplate the tranquility of the cloister of the Pedralbes monastery in Barcelona and see a person walking through the grounds. So I capture these images for La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos of the interaction of light reflections with the forms of architecture, which merge with each other, art and time, a different way of interpreting a reality.
Is the shadow really dark?… If we go to the dictionary, like that of the RAE, it will define it precisely as “darkness, lack of light, more or less complete” and it will refer us to darkness, penumbra, shadyness , blackness, cloud, night… But can’t there be light and clarity in that darkness if we conceive it as part of art?
If not, why then does shadow seduce baroque painters so much, for example? Chiaroscuro, sfumato and silhouette are artistic techniques that make deliberate use of shadow effects.
Shadow as an element of artistic expression cannot be reduced to darkness, since it transmits emotions, feelings, languages ??that evoke and disrupt us, that make us reflect and that make us feel alive. An element that illuminates so many sensations cannot be reduced to mere darkness.
Javanese puppetry (wayang kulit), a type of shadow theater, was developed on the island of Java. The enormous figures (up to five feet tall) in some shadow shows in India are not mere darkness, but quite the opposite, just like the Piying or Chinese shadow theater, with symbolic silhouettes made from tanned animal skins ( donkey, ox and buffalo, generally).
In novel or cinematic fiction, it is customary to associate the shadow generally as the source of the dark arts and black magic. But what would light be without darkness? Isn’t darkness, therefore, a light in itself that inspires us and also awakens our creativity?… Are we sure that the shadow is really dark?
