In this video, whose esthetics recall martyrs and mystics painted by Ribera and Caravaggio in the 1600s, a man bursts onto the screen, running through darkness. Suddenly he stops and kneels in low tide waters in hope of capturing a fleeting glimmer of light from the sky. In a matter of seconds an intense, blinding ray inundates and transfigures his body, offering him brief moments of happiness, which come back to haunt him in the form of agonizing frustration each time darkness returns to reign over all, transforming the “scene” into an insuperable abyss. Naked and crawling like a spooked horse in the water, the man incessantly writhes, rising to his feet only when light reappears from above, when he fills his lungs with air and rejoices in the soft, harmonious melody of angelic voices. The impassioned, sometimes frenzied rhythm alternated with moments of paradisiacal calm and moments of epileptic spasm explicitly recalls the shaking effect of Bacon’s pictorial decomposition. Light is the unmatched star in that which, even without the ghosts that populate the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, has been successfully defined as “technological existentialism”. In this case, virtual reality’s empty space is animated only by bodies struggling in search of a ray of hope, in a dimension that is at once sacred and cryptic. Relying on just a few simple elements, this video depicts the question of the meaning of existence, the search for love and warmth, sentiments and lasting, indelible sensations. Overall, the insistence of the Baroque component, linked to the Tenebrist experience, remains predominant. Art historian Francisco Javier Panera Cuevas1 cannot be considered wrong when he says, «Masbedo’s black is as intense as Robert Ryman’s minimal and conceptual white».
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