info@claradetezanos.com

Member of Como ser fotógrafa,  FotoFéminas and The Journal Collective

Franco-Guatemalan visual artist (1986). In 2009, she co-founded the Center for Contemporary Photography, La Fototeca, and the International Photography Festival GuatePhoto. As a director, she has curated various exhibitions, has led editorial projects, and she has been teaching for over 10 years.

In 2018, De Tezanos published Piedra-Padre, Universo, and Por Maniobras de un Terceto, all of which were shortlisted in prestigious international competitions such as the Aperture & Paris Photo First Book Award 2018, El Mejor Libro del Año 2020, and the Prix du Livre des Rencontres d’Arles 2020. She presented these books in solo exhibitions at La Erre in Guatemala City and La Nueva Fábrica in Antigua Guatemala.

Her latest solo exhibitions were Faites un Vœu at Galerie Lalalande in Paris in 2024 and La Fuente es el Sol at Galería Rebelde in Guatemala City in 2022. Her latest group exhibitions in 2023 took place at HangarY in the exhibition Prendre le Soleil in Paris, Meudon, and in Mexico at Salón ACME. She participated in art fairs such as Zona Maco 2020 in Mexico City, Art Lima 2020 in Peru, Together Arts 2021 in Miami, and Art Paris 2021/22/23 in Paris.

I reflect in my work a personal connection with time. It is a way to solve mysteries and curiosities about my past and to create possible fictions and imaginaries about my present as a personal refuge. My artistic work began with the photographic medium, using the camera and the manipulation of light as a channel to reveal the mysteries of my ancestors, the transgenerational, what is inherited in the psyche, the archive, embedded childhood. As a photographer, flashes of light and their manipulation were always recognized elements in my intimate images. I continue this language of light in a new facet as a visual artist dedicated to objects, sculpture, collective performance, video art and the installation of diaphanous pieces that, through light, lead the viewer to question the present.

For me, time is the great mystery of the world. A time that can be heard passing, that stops, that passes from the past to the future. This mystery has been the center of my work, also nourished by the exploration of other branches of thought such as physics, astronomy and more esoteric pseudosciences. My sculptures are also influenced by the iconography of religious traditions in Guatemala in their form and woodworking technique, thinking of light as an element that has been associated with divinity for centuries. This influence allows me to think about the pursuit of science, faith, metaphysics, myth and the magic of transforming ideas. Thus, my work starts from a dreamlike intuition of perception and moves to scientific research on the passage of time and the movement of the cosmos.

My work always starts from the archive, accumulating images, materials and objects that then come to life in spatial compositions, like assemblages of memory, like a daydream towards self-discovery, like a great philosophical mystery. For me, the luminous experience is a way of revealing or dazzling certainties, a mechanism to direct our gaze towards our ancestors, question the paradoxes of our realities and provoke the contemplation of a natural phenomenon that behaves in infinite ways like light. Finally, my work speaks of the experience of light as the closest thing to the sacred, a time-space to be in communion with everything, a way to create more fables than theories about the universe.