Luz Oscura: Light and Darkness at König Mexico City

Rocha and Snowdon’s paintings gesture towards the mechanically recorded moment. Photo by Oscar Aguilar, Courtesy of the artists & KÖNIG GALERIE

By RACHEL BENHAM May 1, 2025

At midday, the streets of Mexico City’s Condesa neighbourhood are soaked in the kind of violent light that exhibitors at König Gallery, Ramona Rocha and Fernanda Snowdon, harness and manipulate in their own work.

Titled Luz Oscura, König’s current exhibition showcases the art of two Mexican artists who both engage with and subvert the expectations of photorealism, producing work that is luminous and, at times, equally unsettling and uncanny.

In Mexico City, one often has the sensation of existing within a zoetrope, light and dark strobing and shifting depending upon the body’s particular position along the tree-lined avenues.

Stepping into the relative shade of König Gallery, there is a pause, a lag, before the eye fully adjusts and begins to register the art displayed on the walls.

In that delay, the canvases read as photography, and this information only fragments and falls away when the viewer finds the depth and friction of paint rather than print.

In photography, regardless of composition and production, there is an understanding that there existed, at some point, an event, and this event was recorded, perhaps edited, maybe distorted, yet the final output is wholly contingent on the original moment. The photograph is, at its most simplistic, a receipt from having been there, an affirmation of presence and perhaps even intrusion.

Human shapes without features, captured unposed.  Photo by Oscar Aguilar, Courtesy of the artists & KÖNIG GALERIE

But in Rocha and Snowdon’s work, this event is alluded to yet never confirmed. There is the implication of occurrence, a gesture towards a moment in time witnessed and recorded with the fidelity of a machine, although that event is never verified. Instead, it lurks in the corner of the gallery, hidden in its own shadows. It raises questions of reality and accuracy, of authenticity and why that might matter.

Rocha’s work could be characterised by its recurrence of figurative anonymity, where bodies are often shapes or blurs. Blinding silhouettes where form is also implied but not explained: bleached of detail and yet persistently dominant within the frame. This leaves the viewer with a sense of erasure in a space precisely mapped out, its borders defined yet its centre enduringly mysterious.

In El Ritual, the pale stretch of the dominant figure lies heavy across the image, blanking one’s sight in a kind of visual prodrome, a lost space where one is blinded by overexposure and troubled by absence. This method of illumination as excess challenges the urge to scrutiny, asserts existence even in the absence of data, producing a sense of being operating without the scaffold of usable character or category.

Light strips away detail and data.  Photo by Oscar Aguilar, Courtesy of the artists & KÖNIG GALERIE

 While Rocha’s work plays with what is lost when light is present, Snowdon’s work is often more intimate, alluding to the existence of the photograph through the blurred forms and traces of outlines: movement held in suspension, an image haloed by the ghosts of images that preceded it yet delicate with detailing. In Donde los pasos no escuchan sus huellas there is both the grace of duration and the precision of a face held close for inspection, tender with both injury and the whisper of Millais’s Ophelia.

In Snowdon’s Estuve aquí y me acordé de nosotros, the drift of the pupils, their double stamp of black orbs, invokes first the technique of double exposure before drawing the viewer in and arresting their expectation of the manipulation of the photographic print to announce itself as something more ambiguous, borrowing from the result of other method and producing the counterfactual.

Intimate and delicate, the figures are animated with traces of photography.  Photo by Oscar Aguilar, Courtesy of the artists & KÖNIG GALERIE

 In this sense, both Snowdon and Rocha confront the relationship between art and ontology in their work. The gesture towards the concept of photography both functions as a referent to a discrete moment in time and, through the absence of the photograph itself, asks the reader to interrogate existence. Both artists evade photorealism’s project of total verisimilitude, allowing the weight of the medium to lend its own strength: the reflection and grain of paint fracturing the anticipated smooth superficiality of print photography, producing something denser and somehow more confronting.

There is, through the painted surface, a sense of dislocation or divorce from the machine. Mechanical record is both referenced and rejected. The concept of photography is first invoked and then associated, in some way, with the counterfeit, with the facsimile, and with originality.

When the existence of the photograph is produced as a query rather than a fact, by implication, the verifiable event, Henri Bergson’s objective time, is challenged along with it.

The specter of the mechanical, the regulatory, stands one step behind the viewer, the hallmarks of the human-made brushstrokes refusing to be throttled and producing textured experience instead. The balance between luck and intention is tipped all towards desire and determination in a way photography can never quite attain without surrendering to the contrived, the arranged tableau heavy with the fingerprints of design.

Rocha and Snowdon link light with questions of record and machine.  Photo by Oscar Aguilar, Courtesy of the artists & KÖNIG GALERIE

Instead, in the case of Rocha and Snowdon, there is a candid element to the way the figures occur on the canvases, spontaneous, unposed, sometimes embodying the mundane moments that exist and link together between the exceptional, the memorable.

This quality of appearing in disarray, unpolished and unprepared, allows the viewer to become voyeur, the distance of witness counteracted by the unmasked bodies. In this sense, both Rocha and Snowdon participate in both an unmasking and then a retelling of what might have been seen, where their reproduction of time is lived and unboundaried.

In this way, Rocha and Snowdon’s Luz Oscura presents an analogue rebellion against the anxiety of the present moment, away from the flattening mechanical will to ignore or affirm, to validate, to blindly record.

The act of reproducing the event through the medium of paint slows down time and exposes the military beat that we so often march to, reminding us that perception is, of course, a choice, that we participate in experience and we are also inside the experience of others.  WM