Press Release

 

 

Cati Bestard Rotger

To Avoid an Infinite Loop

Act III: Nothing Disappears

10.04- 23.05.2026

 

 

Reception Rome is pleased to present To Avoid an Infinite Loop – Act III: Nothing Disappears, the concluding chapter of the solo exhibition by Cati Bestard Rotger.

 

With Act III, the cycle resolves into a paradox: nothing truly disappears. Rather, transformation emerges as a fundamental condition of reality: what seems to vanish continues to exist in altered forms beyond the limits of perception. If Act I: Shifted introduced a reflection on space, the body, and photography as process, and Act II: Recurrences questioned the stability of the image through dynamics of impermanence and proliferation, this third act addresses the progressive dematerialization of the object and its persistence beyond visibility.

 

The works on view derive from the series era (2022), composed of black-and-white analog photograms created using discarded materials such as wrappings and single-use plastic packaging, objects that lose their function and use-value within moments. Through the direct contact between light, object, and photosensitive paper, these materials are transformed into ambiguous presences, suspended between organic form and spectral apparition. The images do not return the objects in their recognizability, but transfigure them into luminous imprints, evoking textiles, bodies, or biological structures that seem to emerge from an indeterminate space.

 

In this process, what is destined to be discarded is removed from the logic of productivity and reinscribed within a perceptual field where value no longer resides in function, but in the capacity to generate images. The object is no longer represented, nor simply transformed: it is dissolved, yet persists as a trace, as an optical residue, something that continues to surface from darkness without ever fully stabilizing.

 

In their spectral quality, these images act as an unsettling reminder that synthetically produced materials, slow to decompose, do not disappear when they leave our living spaces, but are merely displaced, destined to outlive us elsewhere, in nature. Disappearance is thus reframed as transformation over time: a continuous process in which materials exceed their original function and survive the conditions that produced them.

 

In dialogue with the photograms, the exhibition presents a new time-based work inspired by the era series. The video, constructed through screen recordings of the artist manipulating images in Photoshop, traces a speculative trajectory for these materials. Originally designed to contain and protect, they are reworked into visual matter that refers back to their own history. The work draws a line through the evolution of tools and technologies, suggesting that the material byproducts of mass consumption do not vanish, but accumulate, become part of us, and may outlive us. 

During the opening, an additional chapter of the artist’s work connected to the book Ca s’abuela (2023) will also be presented, together with a second, previously unseen video. This intervention introduces a more intimate and narrative dimension, connecting the investigation of materiality with a reflection on memory, the archive, and transmission.

 

In Act III: Nothing Disappears, the trajectory of To Avoid an Infinite Loop concludes by reformulating its initial premise: avoiding the infinite loop does not mean interrupting repetition, but recognizing its continuity through transformation. If every image is born from variation and undergoes change, it does not end in disappearance, but persists, shifting form, context, and meaning. Dissolution does not mark an end, but a threshold through which the image, like matter itself, continues to exist as potential.