Blink three times

To see inside, one’s eyes must remain closed during meditation.  Eyelids act as the body's blinds, interrupting its vision of the world around us and opening our minds to an introspective space.  Contrary to popular belief, being calm is essential to meditation: slowing down the pace of daily life, diminishing the frantic flow of thoughts, and being aware of our surroundings. The process of reaching the Insight is no easy feat, where we become observers of the observer. It requires effort, perseverance, and a great capacity for integrating thoughts.

Rachel Valdés (Havana, 1990), an expert in the perceptual mechanisms activated by art, offers us a visual and experiential alternative to this process of self-discovery through a multidisciplinary practice that moves from abstract painting, drawing and photography to public installation, marked by a precise command, both formal and emotional,  of light, colour and space. Her pieces operate as a switch that links the visible to the invisible: a blink of sorts, that expedites access to the inner vision. When facing the piece, the viewer’s perception folds inwards, time slows down, and a mode of deep attention emerges that invites one's consciousness to co-create new realities and to perceive oneself within the space the piece inhabits.

Valdés combines rigorous formal research with scientific interests and a spiritual facet enriched by her fascination with illusionism and magic. Her work arises from the study of optical phenomena, the physics of light, and the psychology of colour, as well as a desire to spark an inner resonance within the viewer - an emotional shift that brings us back to the present and heightens awareness of our own existence in relation to our surroundings. Shaped by the duality of her origins, an island bounded by limits that stir a longing for transcendence, the Cuban artist harmonises the rhythm of her homeland with the disciplined rigour of minimalism and suprematism. Her delight in pure forms and silence melts with passionate sensibility and a constant concern for beauty as a transformative experience, capable of illuminating the everyday nature of the spaces. Through her installations, she restructures the appearance of natural elements to reveal their secret order that is surprising, singular, yet always within reach.

The exhibition unfolds across three spaces, each occupied by different disciplines and formats, offering an experiential and perceptual journey guided by the works themselves. Each phase can be understood as a metaphorical blink that shifts awareness from the outside to within.  As the visitor progresses through the stages, the changes become increasingly palpable. It is as if repeating the act of experiencing leads to an unexpected, almost magical transformation. Think shamanistic rituals that repeat a word three times, unlocking other dimensions, or fantasy stories where repeating a gesture alters the perception or location, like Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, clicking the heels of the ruby slippers three times to return home.

 

The exhibition begins with three large canvases of vertical chromatic transitions set in reds, blues, and yellows. These are meditative, serene, hypnotic and immersive paintings. Colour gradually settles across the surface like an atmospheric haze. Within them, the pictorial gesture fades to the point of vanishing, letting colour function as pure energy.

The study of colour has been one of the central pillars of Valdés’s artistic trajectory. Her interest does not lie within the pigment itself, rather in its perception and how light can transform and create infinite modulations as it passes through different means. In her painting, colour becomes a transformative element or phenomenon that resonates profoundly within. These works, reminiscent of Rothko, invite the viewer to engage in a slow, unfettered contemplation, in which the colours embody an emotional state, and the transitions between them a manifestation of the unconscious. Inspired both by the physical theories of light dispersion and by Carl Gustav Jung’s symbolic perspective, she conceives each hue in relation to a concept: blue and violet symbolise spirituality and transcendence; red, the organic and the vitality of blood; yellow, joy, dynamism, and energy; and black, mystery and mysticism. In this sense, her paintings are exercises in perceptual alchemy, transforming the tangible into an inner experience through a physical route that moves away from reason. The paintings represent nothing beyond themselves; they are landscapes of consciousness, surfaces where time seems to stand still, and perception expands.

In some of the small-format canvases, which are more organic and almost biological, the artist explores the flip side of perception: what occurs when we close our eyes. These are inner visions that refer to the dispersion of light within the body: grids, vessels, streams, internal constellations. Valdés asks herself: What happens to perception when we stop perceiving? In these paintings, the image is unfocused, suspended in a haze, and it is precisely there that concentration intensifies.  They are “unseen landscapes,” inner glimmers and constellations where light disperses within the body.

In this first space, the viewer is immersed in a contemplative retreat. No need to close eyes; just look. The paintings are portals to inner colour and horizon; a symbolic blink is enough to reach the same state of presence that meditation offers.

 

The second space houses an immersive installation: a hall of mirrors line the sides, while LED screens above display colour transitions. Visitors cross the corridor as if stepping into a tunnel of light and colour, where the paintings from the first section seem to awaken. The environment dissolves; the body and its reflection multiply. The experience is simultaneously physical, emotional, and psychological.

This piece is based on The Beginning of the End, one of Valdés’ most iconic installations, which was displayed in Times Square in New York. What in 2016 reflected and multiplied the hustle, bustle, and advertising excess of the Big Apple is here transformed into a projection of subjectivities, mediated by colour fields and the resonance of Brown Noise, a sound rich in low-frequency energy and used for relaxation. The work resonates with Infinite Composition (2015), a multidimensional installation in which the seven colours of the spectrum appeared sequentially, accompanied by specific frequencies and the primordial sound OM.

In the piece’s current form, the sensory cycle is brought into the gallery to create an intimate experience. Mirrors duplicate reality; however, they also fragment it. Each movement generates a new composition and alters the reflected landscape; the viewer can conceive of themselves as an integral part of the piece and become aware of their own perceptual act. They see themselves observing, filtering, and interpreting reality. Valdés transforms the space into a device of awareness and a means for self-observation, an exercise in acknowledging the senses through the visualisation of colour images.

The mirror, a recurring element in her practice, acts as a tool that reveals the surroundings and encourages the viewer to transcend it. It is both a reflective surface and quicksand: it reveals the existing reality and destabilises it, erasing the boundaries between subject and object, between what is seen and what is felt. The experience is different for each viewer, shaped by emotional state, inner rhythm and openness to the experience. The blink, a metaphor for the passage between the visible and the invisible, manifests as a perceptual epiphany: the moment when consciousness recognises its own presence within the space and engages with it.

 

The final space culminates in a perceptual synthesis and in the artist’s own body of installation work. Upon entering, a delicate pyramid of mirrored surfaces, detached and silent, invites us to gaze upon ourselves. The object invites an honest, direct gaze, confronting the viewer with the self and revealing what is truly present: multifaceted, complex beings with diverse faces that are not always kind, yet whose essence remains pure. The mirror is a metaphor for the mind: it reflects everything placed before it, yet when removed, leaves no marks or traces, returning to its original cleanliness.

The piece evokes a pyramid that Valdés created in the Pyrenees and left for a few days atop a mountain, far from the public eye. According to the artist, that work was an intimate, almost religious act: a harmonious dialogue with nature, a meditation on time and light. In the gallery, the pyramid reappears as a reminiscence or relic: a sculpture that condenses the experience of looking and seeing oneself in solitude, within its context.

Arranged in a circle around it, a series of framed compositions, drawings, sketches, and photographs document her public interventions. Each piece is divided into three fragments, a formal echo of the title itself. They bear witness to a process that oscillates between the imagination and lived experience, between the idea and its manifestation. Seen together, they reveal how each project arises from the dialogue between object, being, and its surroundings; art functions as a mediator between perception and consciousness.

Any of the experiences across the three sections can give rise to a moment of discovery: a ‘click’ in which a truth is grasped, and clarity is heightened. The term insight, in psychology, refers to the sudden “realisation” that interrupts the automatic thought patterns and prompts changes and new perspectives within one’s habitual cognitive schemas about the world and the self.

Insight, by Rachel Valdés, invites a shift in the gaze. With eyes open, piercing beauty spans colour as one crosses an emotional threshold, and, in the brief interval of a blink, one discovers that inner vision is the only way back home.

 

Nerea Ubieto