IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH to be in Venice on a sunny day, it will take your eyes a while to adjust after you enter the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove on the northern bank of Cannaregio. A curtain is lifted, and suddenly you are enshrouded in darkness. It is nearly all-engulfing: Just across from the entrance, there is a single spotlight forming a circle on the floor, toward which your eyes naturally gravitate. By now your internal rhythm has been disrupted, for that is the abrupt and halting impact of darkness on a body previously attuned to sunlight, sea air, the pastel patchwork of color and stone forming the Venetian scape. And so, having arrived at a standstill, you fumble your way through the dark, toward that meditative state that the darkness demands, toward the spotlight forming a perfect circle on the ground in order to focus on what it contains: a single rock, just large enough to fit in the palm of a hand. And now you’ve come the full way, from the ethereal light and sea of the outside to the darkness and confrontation with solidity on the inside. And it is now, as your eyes gradually adjust, that you come to realize you are actually in a theater, that there are rows of seats just beyond that spotlit rock, and so you carefully step backwards until you find a space to sit, because inevitably you’ve walked a long way to get here. And if you sit there and stare at this object and the dark space beyond and wait for your eyes to carve out your architectural surrounds, you just might be able to make out, at a diagonal remove on the opposite side of the space, a second rock of roughly the same size, bereft of a spotlight, hidden in that selfsame deep dark . . .
This is the scene you’ll find if you make your way to the Cuban pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale, where Wilfredo Prieto, whose practice often involves the staging of found objects in borderline absurdist scenarios, chose to install this single work, Illuminated Stone and Unilluminated Stone, from 2012–14—an instance of the sort of confounding gesture—minimalist to a near-comical extreme—that the Havana-based artist has come to master over the course of the past two and a half decades.
In fact, Prieto is proposing here an idiosyncratic kind of theatricality. That discrepancy between light and dark (and, in turn, presence and absence, according to many metaphysical traditions) is—beyond the rocks—the invisible center of the piece. A theater of objects. A demonstrative poiesis mirroring the phenomenological (dis)appearing in all the surface events comprised in the day-to-day. That experiencing of entering and exiting, away and into both the darkness and the light, the objects becoming a mirror of us and our journeying throughout the day—in fact, the very journeying that has brought us forth into this darkened spotlit space; the rock-objects not just stand-ins for us subjects, but, taken further: a call for a blurring of subject-object, giving rise to an awareness that what is present can be both there and hidden. The rocks almost don’t matter. Or: The matter of their mattering is what’s put into contention, as their material quiddity serves as a means for activating a dynamic contrast with the space around them. Via that non-object object: light. Light’s particulate thingness is the only other material here. For those who journey forth, Illuminated Stone and Unilluminated Stone gives a simple and profound moment to counterbalance the sensory excesses that Venice famously offers—and you can make that moment last as long as you want.
You go back outside, into the light, to adjust your eyes and bodily rhythms, and find nothing is altered. Venice is in whatever condition you left it, the light streaming down from the sky, the seagulls and pavement that got you here still there. You are free to roam onwards, and yet still you remain, mirroring inanimacy, if only for a moment.
Travis Jeppesen is senior editor of artforum.com. His most recent novel is Settlers Landing (ITNA Press, 2023).
