a moment opposite to blindness
Maite de Orbe
16 May - 21 Jun
PV: Thursday, 15 May, 6-9pm
‘A moment opposite to blindness’ is Maite de Orbe’s first solo exhibition in London, showcasing a body of work from 2022-2025 spanning material shot between the Dominican Republic, Chile, UK, Spain, Mexico and The Gambia. Across these locations, Maite chases suspended emotions in landscapes, portraits and details.
The series is a gesture of surrender to the grief of the world we live in, while investigating recurring topics of obsession – performers, desolate deserts, religious iconography, sex work, car crashes, ballroom, and lovers and friends. Taking its title from Anne Carson’s ‘Autobiography of Red’, which loosely transposes the Greek myth of Geryon and Heracles into a modern setting and romantic tension, ‘a moment opposite to blindness’ aims to capture raw and tender intimacy.
Maite de Orbe is a Spanish, London-based artist working with photography, performance and moving image. Combining these media, their practice is focused on the complexity of identity making, touching on sexuality, gender and queerness, belonging, migration and community. Working collaboratively with dissident communities, de Orbe’s practice uses a visual documentary language at first that then lures into fantasy and world making, by prioritising love, intimacy and sensuality.
The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Clara Dublanc, ‘Notes on Entropy and Surrender’, and an editioned zine designed by the artist, featuring fragments of a conversation between Maite de Orbe and Aleksandra Moraś titled ‘On Moments Opposite to Blindness’.
Notes on Entropy and Surrender
Words by Clara Dublanc
Maite de Orbe’s imagery occurs in liminal spaces and feels quiet, transcendent. Borrowing from Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red”, a moment opposite to blindness, is the crushing awareness of surrendering to an aesthetic experience. Combining counterculture aesthetics with a flair for the spiritual, de Orbe’s work foregrounds dissident communities, and the joy, resilience and rage needed for everyday survival. Like a secret unlocked, de Orbe’s gaze comes from a position of reverence, mixing and matching the sacred and the sensual to the point of making them indistinguishable: a dog in an deserted petrol station transports you to the dream like state of the siesta hour under the scorching sun, a statue of an angel waiting to be transported creates a quasi-religious moment on an empty street, a person, looking flirtatiously through the lens with a thigh tattoo reading ‘angry’ – the frame at the same height as the subject – invites the viewer to lay on the floor at their level, ambiguously participant and voyeur.
Shot on film and across continents in Dominican Republic, Chile, UK, Spain, Mexico and The Gambia, de Orbe has developed a horizontal approach to image making, focusing on the idiosyncrasies of each place, but imbuing each image with their personal emotional qualities, no matter the country where they find themself.
Over the past five years, de Orbe has made performance documentary a key element of their practice, photographing London’s lesbian strip scene, drag performance, pole dancing, as well as Dominican Kiki Balls and rap battles. Maite, a pole dancer themself, show they understand how to photograph movement and to capture live performance fleeting moments. Some of these live images and the crowds surrounding them feel almost like a whisper, a direct reference to the stillness sometimes experienced by performers presenting work; the noise subsides, and the instant of a movement becomes atemporal. Framing the performers, de Orbe unveils a universe of their crushes, obsessions, youth and queer culture.
De Orbe’s images from Mexico, Chile and The Gambia feel intimate yet desolate, focusing on marginal landscapes, grief and the silence encountered in cemeteries, churches and forgotten rooms. They apply the same lens of veneration to these expanses as they do to performers. These entropic landscapes provide the viewer with a hyper-focal blueprint on what is important for Maite to foreground.
The images created in Spain – de Orbe’s home country, and London where they live and work, feel more immediate. De Orbe has a nuanced understanding of the social and political context as well as evident friendships with many of the subjects of their photography, who are presented in domestic environments and performing everyday minutiae, seemingly shot midway a conversation.
De Orbe’s universe is not restricted to friends and people within their community, and it extends to objects and places, from broken down cars to overornamented crosses, using these to channel their emotional landscape. Their imagery brings together a soft romantic gaze with the aesthetics of wrestling, sex work, queer nightlife and motorcycle races. Their black and white photography – sometimes overexposing their subjects – seem an impossible quest to capture the immaterial: Maite manipulates the white balance to show ghostly silhouettes that feel like apparitions. Maite invites you to enter their universe through a documentarist door, but quickly the viewer understands that the request is to traverse away to a dream-like state, where their fantasy creates a spiritual lexicon, lining up a shrine of angels to adore. It is in bringing these seemingly disparate worlds in creative collision that Maite finds a rebellious yet poetic flair, and invites the viewer to participate in the sublime discovery of the everyday.
Request the catalogue or press pack.