Lucida

Lucida is about a threshold. Under ultraviolet light, fluorescent pigments on the skin absorb wavelengths the eye barely registers and release part of that energy as visible light into the dark. The camera records a glowing body, one that produces its own visibility. This simple physical fact is the centre of the series.

The title comes from the Latin lucidus: bright, shining, clear. The series turns one of photography's basic conditions around. Photographing a body has always meant photographing the light it returns: a sun or a lamp strikes the skin, and the skin sends part of that light back to the lens. Lucida keeps the camera and moves the source. Most of the light the camera records comes from the figure itself.

The work departs from the architectural figures of UnNude, where hard light carves the body into form, and from the optical ruptures of Chimera, where bent mirrors fracture it. In Lucida the body becomes a surface to be activated. Familiar anatomical landmarks dissolve into fields of colour and luminescence, until it becomes impossible to say where the skin ends and the glow begins. The image reaches the eye as colour and energy first, and only afterwards as a body.

Two pulls hold the series in tension. In one, the body dissolves into pattern and repetition, until the self seems spread across a whole field of light. In the other, form is carved out of complete darkness, as if by a single source. Such light usually strikes the figure from outside; here, the visible light originates in the pigment on the skin. Lucida moves past both toward abstraction, until flesh reads as a nebula.

Movement enters through long exposure. Bodies blur and multiply, their trajectories traced in streaks of light. These images accumulate time and show the body as an event. When a body moving in the dark carries lines and points of light, its motion turns into a drawing. Lucida starts from that almost scientific way of recording movement and lets it slip into a hallucinatory register.

The imagery moves through mythological and ritual associations without illustrating any specific tradition. Faces turn into masks, and bodies into icons of an invented cosmology. The fluorescent patterns translate body markings into the language of neon and render sacred geometry in luminous colour.

Much of Lucida is made in collaboration with dancers, performers, and body artists whose training allows them to hold long-exposure poses and choreographed movement inside the frame. In those sessions, the subject is an active participant, a co-author of the gesture the camera accumulates while the shutter is open.