TITLE: Obumbratio

Obumbratio is a Latin term which means darkening. In its verb form 'Obumbro' means to shade, cover in shadow, as in Virgil's Aeneid when he exclaims 'Obumbrant aethera telis', they darkened the sky with their arrows.

This word perfectly synthesizes what this work want to express. It is a complex term that, depending on the context, can also be translated as cover up, tarnish or shelter and protect.

That obumbratio in this photographic series is represented by the bodies that are drowned in that darkness. It is a representation of hidden desire, like in Buñuel's ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ or Lorca's ‘Dark Love Sonnets’, It shows what should not or does not want to be seen and which, when observed through the darkness, from that darkened sky with its arrows, reaches to us deformed and transformed into something new.

AUTHOR: Lázaro Louzao (Spain)

Lázaro Louzao (Lugo, 1988) has been exhibiting photography for 15 years, with a dozen solo exhibitions so far and participating in various collective exhibitions in Spain and Mexico. He started to work in cinema in 2013 as a director, producer and screenwriter, making three short films and a feature film, ‘That Night of November’ (2018), the first LGTB-themed film shot in Galician language, which toured around the world in more than twenty festivals and projecting in theaters and screens throughout Spain.

In 2020 he received the XVI Marcela e Elisa LGBT visibility Award for his work and at the beginning of 2022 he published ‘Palar a Pel’, a book that collects his photographic work of male nudes, with a foreword by Abel Azcona and an epilogue by the collective Los Picoletos.