Some photographers aspire to unveil the world. Letting the hidden reality to show up in that stubborn piece that a picture is. Let’s the painting, some said long ago, the path towards the abstraction and let’s offer the reality the eye can’t see. In his pictures, the world wants to be shown the way the eye can’t see.
This has nothing to do with Elena and Jesus’s work program, who I have occasionally talked about how irrelevant is to identify which is the object of each picture or the place where the shut was pressed can be. It feels like there is something ambitious behind it, something that might bear a relation with the mission of a certain kind of painting to get together with, at this point, after more than a century.
It bears pondering about so many things: the echoes of the visual perception. About whether certain pictures inevitably refer to the effects of peripheral vision, touch or sound, through the material illusion they propose. About the colour as a theme, about its denial, summoned by an absence (just like John Cage’s silence summons the sound in the room), about its alteration, which causes synesthetic experiences (see the colour blue in its night simulations). About the work of composition, as if the photography resumed the old abstract artists’ job, only this time even more architecturally, where the perspective triggers new nuances… A longing for painting, canvas of pixels: the suspicious viewer may identify Rothkos or monochrome warriors in the distance. This is reinforced by the work on cotton paper, aluminium… which brings back the value of the ‘original’, which is exhibited with its virtually intact aura.
But there is still more in some of these pictures. Something mysterious and uncanny. It can’t be said that a kind of photography that aspires to abstraction and the manipulation of the perception is narrative, which it tells a story, but some of these images (endless stairs, sensed cliffs, blocked highways…) fit in a partial and austere frame, speak of stories hardly sensed in their margins, outside the frame. We have arrived either too soon or too late to a happening or a crime that, in the end, is only in our minds.
The Exposition                                                                                                         The Catalogue