Daniel Canogar, one of the artists from the article, born in 1964, is a Spanish artist, working in photography, film, sculpture, and installations. A lot of his older work looks at the human body close up and in new ways. He presents the human anatomy in a way that is almost unrecognizable to the viewers. For example, Horror Vacui, done in 1999 and shown below, is a wallpaper made of images of hands.
In several of his works, like Alien Memory, he uses a projector to show the images on the walls and then uses different elements on top of that, like fiber optic cables.
Dermal Thresholds is another example of a different look at human anatomy. Canogar uses images of the inside of the human body, which were taken from endoscopic explorations, as well as images of human skin. He is placing images of the interior and exterior of the human body in the same space and it becomes hard to tell what is what. In this installation, he also uses the fiber optic cables.
Horror Vacui is a wallpaper made up of images of human hands. When in a gallery, it is fit to cover the entire wall. When the viewer is far away from the image, it is hard to see that there are human hands. It just looks like a black and white patterned wallpaper. But closer up, you can see that the pattern is made of hands, which are feeling around and reaching for one another, or for something. They seem to be trying to find something to hold onto. The image is in black and white, creating a strong contrast between the white of the hands and the black background. The black background also makes the viewer unable to see where the hands are coming from, like they are reaching up from the depths. With these hands on the wall of a gallery, it would almost seem as though they were reaching out to the viewer, because it seems like they would be about life sized.
I think that the strong contrast between the hands and the background is a really strong aspect of this piece. The hands look like they are coming out at the viewer and it makes the viewer feel unsettled because its just this massive wall of hands reaching for something. The only aspect of the piece that I don't find as strong is the scale of the hands. One of the images above shows a viewer observing the piece in the gallery and you can see that the hands are actually fairly small. Its hard to tell if they are live sized or not but at that size, they seem more just like a pattern rather than hands. I think that if they were a little bit larger then they would stand out more from a distance. However, it is hard to definitely critique this aspect without viewing the piece at its full size.
