An enigmatic photograph: a bluish rectangle peppered with minute incrustations of diversely lit particles. As if held on pause, a white nebula is caught as it emerges horizontally. A random mass of fragments shimmer against a dark backdrop, without quite managing to coalesce into constellations. A host of oft-seen reproductions of the universe has made us familiar with analogous visions. All we have to do is think of the Milky Way, meteors, shooting stars and comet tails. That said, there is something spectral about this image of fragmented matter in the ungraspable disorder of a blue void. Cornelia Parker has eloquently titled this piece Einstein’s Abstracts, and the artist tells you, notwithstanding its appearance, the work is photomicrograph of a small detail of the blackboard used by Albert Einstein during his lecture at Oxford in 1931. The blackboard on which he scribbled with chalk, his theory of relativity. And in her work this seemingly insignificant, almost unnoticed, detail transfigured into a whole world — the most transmuted, by virtue of a lens, into the suggestion of a thousand possible worlds. The impossible made real. Paul Klee contended that art always gives us a glimpse of the invisible. Here, what is barely more than a chalk mark on a blackboard, occupying a very specific place and meaning in the original discourse and is transformed into an unexplored universe which was right there before our very eyes even if we never saw it. And that tiny fragment of truth, cut off from its place within the discourse and the image, materialises as if from some other world, multiplying its meanings and opening up the possibility for uncanny evocations.

It would seem impossible to formulate all this in such a way as Cornelia Parker does, but that is what deconstruction is all about: bringing forth previously imperceptible meanings when things stop being what they apparently are, when they lose that sense of solidity with which we usually identify them, just at that moment in which they begin to reveal some other articulation of signs and meanings previously overlooked by normal vision. Because other possible discourses are contained within the discourse, just as each image contains a potential of images that the initial articulation of meaning (our perennial fixation with meaning) prevents us from seeing or from reading. Here, Cornelia Parker frees everything that the routine of image — as with discourse, also with names — had shunted to a secondary plane. It is as if the image we are seeing explodes in front of our eyes and multiplies itself in other images that the first one prevents us from seeing. And it is not that what we see had been previously hidden. Quite the reverse, it was always there, but now shifted to the foreground. And then we can no longer return to the contemplation of it in the same way we used to.

Cornelia Parker has frequently been accused of being obsessed with matter. However, I believe this judgement might, in fact, mask one of the most enthralling dimensions of her work: her power to provoke huge explosions in the field of vision only to recreate it over and over again. Like when things, which seem to have been with us forever, break down and explode from inside, losing all their consistency and thus attaining an odd lightness. A lightness closely related with that other lightness posited by Italo Calvino as one of the key memos of this new millennium which he never got to see. The explosions provoked by a significant part of Cornelia Parker’s work bear a relation with the above — with the lightness of those things which, all of a sudden, when losing their solidity and their compactness, break up into many other possible universes that the image invents in order to offer them up to a new vision. In fact, like images and discourses, the things are offered to us interlocked in a dense weave of articulations of meaning by virtue of which, they are partly what they are because of what they are next to. Here, as in so many of her works, Cornelia Parker frees them from the world they are anchored to and returns them to us lightened, liberated from a knot of meanings which they are not entirely in possession of. And, in this way, they reappear anew.