Experience Palimpsest Exhibition | Nicholé Velásquez | Gitana Rosa Gallery - Gitana Rosa Gallery Palimpsest Exhibition Nicholé Velásquez

Palimpsest is a contemporary photography exhibition by Nicholé Velásquez presented at Gitana Rosa Gallery, featuring analogue multiple-exposure works.

PALIMPSEST

Nicholé Velásquez
Gitana Rosa Gallery

Palimpsest is a term borrowed from manuscript culture: a writing surface incompletely
erased and reused, in which earlier layers of text remain visible beneath the new
inscription. As a curatorial frame, it resists the logic of replacement and the assumption
that the present supersedes what came before, insisting instead on coexistence: the
persistence of earlier strata within any contemporary moment.
This is precisely what Velásquez’s practice enacts at both a technical and conceptual level.
Working with analogue multiple exposure, he composes directly within the camera:
several distinct photographic moments — bodies, architectures, landscapes — are
registered onto a single negative, without the possibility of post-production correction or
digital mediation. The image is not assembled. It accumulates. Each exposure does not
cancel the previous one but inhabits it.
Velásquez trained at the International Center of Photography and was later awarded the
Prix Industries et Cultures / Art Faber for his sustained attention to contemporary
industrial processes — the choreography of labour within systems structured by
maximum efficiency and minimum slack. That the same artist would develop a technique
premised on accumulation and suspension rather than selection is not a contradiction but
a revealing tension: multiple exposure introduces delay, density, and friction into visual
regimes that increasingly privilege speed and resolution.
The implications extend beyond formal considerations. In these photographs, no single
subject holds visual authority: a corporate tower dissolves into something ancient and
ruinous; a body becomes indistinguishable from the terrain it moves through; urban
geometry and organic form press against one another without resolution. These are not
metaphors applied to photographs. They are structural conditions of the photographs
themselves.

Velásquez’s decision to work in analogue is therefore not nostalgic but epistemological.
It concerns how an image can register the world. Rather than isolating a decisive instant,
film allows multiple moments to coexist within the same frame. The resulting
photographs resist the conclusiveness of the digital image and the authority of the single
viewpoint.
Palimpsest asks us to consider how images — like memories, like cities, like political
histories — are never singular or stable but composite: the result of successive
inscriptions that partially obscure and partially reveal one another. For Velásquez, whose
practice unfolds between New York and Berlin and whose curatorial work has engaged
queer and feminist histories, the palimpsest is not simply a formal device. It is also a
refusal of erasure — an insistence that what lies beneath the surface remains legible.
The photographs sustain this condition of visibility. What appears is never a single image
but a layered field of relations: contemplative and documentary, aesthetic and political,
individual and collective, all held together within the same frame.

Emilio Rapanà, March 2026