Despite the everlasting allure of this text, the relevance of this piece did not strike until the body of work started to inhabit the same physical space.

The idea of a proxy originated from the notion of an object too perfect to occur repeatedly in the human plane - a prototype for existence, of sorts.

However, the most influential reference, would not be the former but rather, in a more holistic approach, the dissection of comprehensible planes of existence: the Shadows, the Reflections and the Things Themselves. If one were to apply these concepts to the body of work, the result would be a categorised documentation of the former.

“In the beginning, he might only trace the Shadows. Then Reflections of people and other things in water. Next we would come to see the Things Themselves.”.

Let us speculate:

There are, therefore, a few possibilities for interpreting the work according to these stages: Surrogates can occupy the place of the Shadows, free of its pupeteers or even, a record of the Shadows slightly shifting perspective, in a static capture of what is moving; Surrogates becomes a series of perspective-shifting shadows, La Métamorphose a live monitoring of reflections. Regarding the Things Themselves, those could either be paralleled with the viewer in motion, captured in these.

La Métamorphose, could encompass all the stages, having the audience simultaneously act as the captive and the puppeteer. The viewer first finds themselves wandering through the dark trying to make sense of these images replicated on box TVs, to find out they are the ones casting the shadows through their reflection that they are desperate to find, like a sort of Narcisus. They then, are semi blinded by the contrast of the flat screen, with its ethereal organised chaos.

“Would he, rather, believe that the Shadows he formerly knew were more real than the objects now being shown to him?”