Holding a Sunrise: Rodrigo Zamora - Black Room

In Holding a Sunrise, Rodrigo Zamora unfolds a poetics of light and color as forces that shape perception. The Black Room becomes a suspended territory, a space where images exist in a state of emergence, before they fully settle into the world.

The central work , two  sculptures composed of stacked sheets of paper,  hold a sunrise in place: layers of material preserving the intensity of a first moment. Each sheet accumulates time, pressure, and chromatic residue, forming a body that is both fragile and assertive. Paper, humble and everyday, here reveals itself as a medium capable of sustaining something as elusive as the day’s initial gleam.

Accompanying this piece is a series of watercolors in which water, pigments, and transparency create landscapes that hover between evocation and disappearance. Stains do not describe; they produce atmosphere, dissolving horizons, light advancing across the surface and retreating into reserved areas of white. Color, guided by intuition and accident, draws unexpected relations between memory and observation.

Zamora constructs a circular process, where remnants become new materialities and experiments evolve into final images. His practice does not seek to dominate form, but to follow the inherent logic of water, paper, and pigment, embracing overflow, absorption, and surprise.

Sustaining a Sunrise is an exercise in care: a will to hold onto the ephemeral and to recognize fragility as a mode of resistance. In each work, light is gathered, accumulated, and offered again, as if it were possible, even for a moment, to sustain the world’s beginning.

With the support of the Chilean Ministry of Culture