In the pieces of the WYSIWYG series, the ephemeral signs that only appear on the screen while the computer programs are running materialize in oil paintings on panel. The same is true of the Vases (Objects for Emptying a Space) series, which presents an array of ordinary objects whose cracks reveal the entrails of 3D and graphic design programs. Vases and vessels literally pour their hearts out: their interiors are represented as the transparent and empty layers of image editing software.

This interest in exposing the constituent elements of screen images goes even deeper in the paintings and prints of Palette ASCII. Digital images from the artist’s personal archive are dissected, decomposed and turned into visual poems based on their ASCII code and their colour palette. The resulting narrative technique produces an image perceived as a text, although that text is incomprehensible to human beings. The quasi-ethnographic narrative of the Technical Images videos shows a dialogue between human activity and the uses of different devices and their codes.

Lobera constantly posits a dichotomy between the human eye and the digital lens, causing spectators to lose all notion of physical substance. This confusion translates into a dematerialization of both the biological body and the photographed face in Fossilized Filter Masks. The visages are partly veiled by filters like those used on Instagram. These pieces allude to a dimensionality that does not yet exist, a dimensionality that emerges from within and begins to take shape as a cross between what we see and the underlying tool. The artist practises a forward-thinking archaeology situated in the zero-dimensionality that Flusser conceptualizes as images on the brink—in this case, a future museum that has no architecture but is determined to endure.

– Dalia de la Rosa