Discovering the image at CaixaForum’s ’Una certa foscor’

In 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris. It was not missed for over 24 hours. Afterwards, the gap left on the wall became this Parisian gallery’s main attraction. In the two years before the police recovered this da Vinci painting, hoards of people- including Franz Kafka- queued to see the gap. Many of them had never before entered the Louvre.

Today visitors crowd in to see the Mona Lisa, but the fact is they don’t manage to see it either. At best, they snap a pic on their phones that gets buried in the stack of images produced and incessantly accumulated and the image has little chance of affecting them or making them think. How many images do we fail to notice or forget in a heartbeat?

The exhibition Una certa foscor (a kind of darkness) reflects on our visually anesthetized society. It’s on until January 5 at CaixaForum as part of the Comisart program, which is encouraging young curators to interpret this financial institution’s modern art collection afresh. This exhibition was curated by the brilliant Alexandra Laudo.

Laudo took the kidnapping of the famous da Vinci painting as the exhibition’s starting point, “It is the images that are resistant to us, it is the images we do not see, that encourage our desire to see,” says Laudo.