The Decisive Moment

José Antonio Ochoa

This project explores the influence of Romantic iconography on cinema, with particular attention to the German painter Caspar David Friedrich.

In keeping with my recent body of work (Ut Pictura Kinesis, Sustained Time, and Looking at Time), the pieces I present in this exhibition revolve around two main themes. First, the relationship between cinema and painting, identifying and reinterpreting cinematic landscapes with references to Romantic painting. Second, an attempt to evoke and update in contemporary times the concept of the sublime inherent in Romantic art.

The yearning and pursuit of the sublime that motivated Romantic painters have not expired. On the contrary, the desire to grasp that which overwhelms us, to apprehend what exceeds our understanding, and to express the ineffable remains at the core of many artistic inquiries. These efforts, perhaps Sisyphean, seek to reach a more complete expression of the depths of the human experience, with all its mystery, tragedy, grandeur, and beauty.

The path toward the sublime, with all its height and depth, points inward to a spiritual and mystical world, suggesting transcendence and inviting us to move beyond self-absorption toward something much greater, which both fills and overflows us.

This path—marked by questions and silences, with more uncertainties than answers—is the one I aim to traverse in this exhibition.

This exhibition is dominated by the figure of the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich, whose impact on cinematic iconography today is evident. Sometimes, the references in cinematic imagery to Friedrich’s work are clearly intentional; other times, the similarities are more subtle, leaving room for doubt about whether the relationship is conscious and direct. My interest lies not in determining whether these similarities are deliberate or coincidental but in simply acknowledging the de facto presence of Friedrich’s visual language in cinema.

To explain my creative process, I refer to the introduction to Ut Pictura Kinesis:

This project seeks to bring painting into dialogue with other contemporary representational languages—in this case, cinema—to reclaim the dialectical nature of the image and engage the viewer. The aim is to suspend cinematic images in time, allowing them to be enjoyed outside their movement, time, and space; to contemplate them—not as one would with cinema—but in pause and silence.

In my process, I extract a frame from a film, thereby decontextualizing an image. I act as though taking a photograph from a narrative sequence, selecting what my gaze determines to be “the decisive moment.” Sometimes, departing from Cartier-Bresson’s concept, I seek to extend that moment by integrating adjacent frames, relying on painting’s ability to convey a sense of sustained time. I appropriate the essential image and its surroundings, aiming to capture their entirety in the painting.

For me, cinema has already constructed this image and its sequence within the atmosphere of a painting set in motion. The frozen frames, renewed and intensified through painting, summon the presence of the landscape from the artificial nature of the cinematic image. In doing so, I seek to create a postmodern Romantic vision of the landscape, in the midst of the media’s overwhelming power, to critique the barrenness of dominant uniform thought.

The title of this exhibition derives from that concept coined by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and alludes to my creative process. While it relates closely to photography procedurally, photography itself is absent from my method. What interests me most about the decisive moment is its relationship with time—the ability of photography to suspend time and keep it perpetually present. As Bresson expresses:

“Photography is, for me, the spontaneous impulse of a perpetual visual attention that captures the moment and its eternity.”

Unlike Cartier-Bresson, I do not seek to freeze reality but to suspend cinematic imagery in time. He aims to capture a precise moment through photography; I attempt to do so through painting. By halting the flow of cinematic images, I hope to invite viewers to pause, observe, reflect, and above all, enjoy.

In this collection, we find images of steadfast stillness that resonate with movement, while others reveal fleeting motion that has been immobilized. In both cases, time takes center stage in the work—time that is sustained.

The starting point for this project lies in two works by Friedrich that I discovered in cinema and which, coincidentally, share a room in Berlin’s Old National Gallery: Monk by the Sea and Abbey in the Oakwood. After identifying these references, I began tracing Friedrich’s iconographic echoes in cinema, aiming to reinterpret and create my own version. My goal was to complete a round trip—from painting to cinema and back to painting.

This research into Friedrich’s influence on cinema yielded surprisingly fruitful results, enabling me to assemble a relatively extensive exhibition that fulfills my intention of completing numerous back-and-forth journeys between the canvas and the screen. Through these works, I invite viewers to embark on the same journey. The titles of my paintings indicate the starting (and ending) points in Friedrich’s oeuvre, leaving it to the curiosity—or cinephilic erudition—of viewers to uncover the intermediate stage: the specific frame that serves as the creative hinge.

Describing Romantic and modern landscapes, the Victorian critic John Ruskin noted that if a leitmotif were to condense their essence, it could well be “at the service of the clouds.” This service operated on two levels: literally, through the immense task of observing, classifying, and representing clouds of all kinds, and figuratively, by aspiring to capture the sublime. This aspiration urges the viewer to transcend everyday realities and touch the celestial and sublime, inviting them to take a walk among the clouds.

By painting nature and landscapes, Romantic painters were able to situate us within a context of incomprehensible beauty and grandeur, allowing us to intuit the paradox of our evident smallness and our boundless desires.

The representations of Romantic masters—whom my work seeks to echo—transcend spatial and temporal coordinates, achieving a portrayal of an inner, spiritual landscape. Alongside the Romantics, among whom Friedrich holds a distinctive voice, I hope to guide viewers on a journey through painting and cinema—a journey through natural and physical places, but one that does not end there. It aspires to delve into equally beautiful and mysterious realms, psychological and symbolic, that reside within us and which we are privileged to contemplate.