From Friday 16 January, a solo exhibition of the promising young artist Cecilia de Val opens at the camara oscura art gallery.

Cecilia de Val (Zaragoza, Spain, 1975) is a multitalented artist, photographer and singer both by vocation. On her photographs Cecilia self-portraits like a modern heroin who shapes her adventures and her settings as she pleases: enchanted forests, sci-fi sets, and suburban architectures.

Sometimes, cut-out doppelgängers of Cecilia tread silent dreams of pain, treason, and conspiracy. The crossover of genres like science-fiction literature, short stories, fantastic cinema, comic, and Renaissance painting produce disturbing and shifting images, nearly ungrasping, on the boundaries of the subconscious. Her themes address individuality and identity by means of their opposite: multiplicity and double. As Borges said, “crystal haunts us. If a mirror is found in a room, I am no longer alone. There is someone else. There is a reflection that sets up a silent theatre at the crack of dawn”.

Cecilia knows that beauty attracts and scares equally and she plays with it. Afar from the snapshots that grasp a fleeting moment, her photographs are stories woven of eternal moments in which the ordinary becomes the fantastic.

On the other hand, the role play of Cecilia as director, main character and creator of her images gives her an unusual freedom to convey a feminine and feminist vision on which we see ourselves projected virtually.