Conrado Krainer
Afterimage: On Form and Residue
The series proposes an investigation of color as an unstable material and as a perceptual event. Starting from organic forms — flowers, stems, vegetal structures — the images displace the natural from its habitual regime of representation and project it into a field of artificial chromatic intensities, where recognition gives way to sensory experience.
By radicalizing color — through inversions, extreme contrasts, and non-naturalistic palettes — the work breaks with the idea of photography as a faithful record of the world. The image ceases to be a document and instead operates as a surface of transformation, where vegetal matter is reconfigured into an almost spectral state. What we see is no longer the flower, but the trace of its presence — a residue that oscillates between the organic and the digital, between the visible and the latent.
In this sense, there is a continuity with the investigation of time, but here time manifests as retinal persistence, as afterimage. Colors vibrate, collide, and overlap as if still in the process of formation, suggesting that the image does not settle, but remains in a state of becoming.
Forms, at times reduced to silhouettes or fragments, evoke a tension between control and accident. The flower — traditionally associated with delicacy and transience — is pushed to the limits of its legibility, becoming almost an abstract sign. In this displacement, the series proposes a reflection on the excess of images in contemporary life: rather than adding another recognizable representation, it creates an interruption, a noise, a field of instability where the gaze must relearn how to see.











