Naked death
The passage of time is one of the intrinsic philosophical debates of humanity, the question of representing the fundamental fear of the human being: the end, death as that to which we can never respond. In this sense, photography can be understood as the triumph over the end of time, and therefore also over death.
The photographic image is the best antidote that the human being has created to overcome oblivion, to that blurred blur that time will create tomorrow of today because, it certifies the trace, the trace of what will inevitably disappear. Cartier-Bresson pointed that "the photo is the spontaneous impulse of a perpetual visual attention, which captures the instant and its eternity".
In this eternal reflective game Kay Machín has enrolled his most recent project, but the author in an effort to give another twist to the existential principles of photography as a technological phenomenon of capturing the image of a model has decided to expose his work as a revelation transmuted to the digital age of the last impulses that José Guadalupe Posada could not print during the hard times of the Mexican revolution who, in a more ironic and "stark" way, sank into the legacy of the cult of Mictlantecuhtl the essence of his engravings .
From a formal point of view, the analogy is inevitable and may give us the impression that the author has been reviewing a portfolio of drawings and engravings by the Aztec artist, but this has not been the case, it is a misleading association, it is not precise or true.
Kay Machín has reached formally similar results by an independent route, in addition, Kay's intention is another, the artist intends to move away from social commitments, there is no irony or sarcasm in his aesthetic approach, nor are far-fetched connections of aesthetic influence, Kay pretends to be pragmatic, depressive and concise in his creative exposition, I would say that even reiterative in his impulse of sadistic will to remind us how futile our existence is.
"La Muerte Desnuda", as Kay Machín has called her series is, a large group of nudes with a refined handling of the framing and chiaroscuro of the image without much depth of field, that is, which technically does not imply greater complexities, no However, the author has reserved the heavy area of the work for the conceptual issue that supports the expressive duality of the image.
In this section Kay Machín reunites that marriage of opposites where one does not mean anything without the other: Black and White vs. Color, Good and Evil, Yin and Yang, ultimately Life and Death like the two parts of unity and being.
Kay Machín, shows us in these captures a new search in itself on an eternal theme of humanity, cited and common from the most strictly scientific thought to the most varied universal mythologies, however, surely the artist prefers that we reaffirm ourselves in the words of the Mexican engraver, "Death," said Posada, "is democratic, because after all, güera, brunette, rich or poor, all people end up being skull."