Cati Bestard Rotger

To Avoid an Infinite Loop

Act II: Recurrences

27.02- 04.04.2026

 

Act II: Recurrences is the second chapter of Cati Bestard Rotger’s solo exhibition. While Act I: Shifted introduced a reflection on space, the body, and photography as process, Act II: Recurrences addresses more directly the theme of impermanence, challenging the idea of the photographic image as a fixed and immutable instant.

 

Against a common understanding of photography as a medium capable of arresting the flow of time, the works presented in this second act are images in continuous transformation, destined to change, multiply, or disappear. The exhibition unfolds around a fundamental tension: on the one hand, the fragility of the analog image; on the other, the potentially infinite proliferation of the artificially generated image.

 

The exhibition space retains the traces of the wooden structure from Act I: Shifted, now dismantled and reconfigured. At the center of the gallery, a table made from the same wood holds a box (handmade by the artist) containing a new cycle of lumen prints from the series fragments (2020–26), produced without the use of a camera or chemical fixing. The photosensitive paper—partly expired—is left outdoors for hours or days, exposed to light, humidity, atmospheric agents, and the organisms present in the environment. The resulting images do not represent the landscape, but emerge from the interaction between materials, light, and time, calling into question the conventions of photographic representation and the cultural assumptions it has historically helped to consolidate. The prints are preserved, unfixed, inside the box. Each opening entails a loss: exposure to light causes the image to progressively fade. In fragments, the experience of viewing coincides with the transformation and the disappearance of the work itself.

 

In dialogue with this fragility, the exhibition presents a series of images, titled recurrence (2026), generated through artificial intelligence from scans of the lumen prints. Through a programming process developed via Gemini API with custom scripts, the source images are combined and reworked according to variable parameters, generating hundreds of iterations from a limited number of scans. However, this proliferation is also subject to technical and algorithmic conditions that orient its form and recurrence: the repetition of patterns, the tendency toward saturation, the reiteration of recurring visual solutions reveal how the idea of infinite generative freedom is always mediated by predefined structures.

 

These images maintain a high degree of abstraction, yet at the same time evoke satellite views or aerial landscapes, further extending the reflection on the limits of representation. If in fragments the image is unique, unstable, and destined to dissolve, in the AI-generated works it becomes replicable, replaceable, potentially infinite. In this overproduction, the concept of the uniqueness of the work dissolves, as does any hierarchy between original and copy. The images become equivalent, not for their formal value, but for the process that generates them.

 

In Act II: Recurrences, impermanence is not only a material condition, but a critical position. Entrusting the image both to light and to the algorithm highlights two opposite yet complementary forms of instability: disappearance and proliferation. In both cases, the image is never definitive. It is trace, residue, possibility. By opening the box that contains the lumen prints or observing the continuous flow of artificial images along the gallery walls, the viewer is invited to confront a central paradox of contemporaneity: everything is destined to disappear, and at the same time everything can regenerate endlessly, transforming into another form.