« For
Alberto García-Alix, one of Europe’s most acclaimed photographers,
the camera is a constant companion, a partner in documenting the
traces of his passage, the faces and places he has known. The eighty
photographs being shown in his first solo exhibition at UCCA are
selections from De donde no se vuelve (From where there is no return
), an ambitious photographic narrative spanning over three decades,
from the post-Franco period of free expression known as “La Movida”
to the present day.
Here,
we see humanity unvarnished, uncensored, unapologetic and nakedly
real. The settings are the streets, sidewalks and tenements of
Madrid, Paris or Beijing; the subjects are bikers, brawlers, rockers,
dealers, users, lovers, friends, enemies and strangers. Some of them
are still alive. Others are long dead. But every face that gazes back
at us has been preserved with quiet dignity, developed lovingly by
hand in the artist’s own darkroom, and given a position of
importance in that realm between presence and absence, that place of
no return. » - Jérôme Sans, UCCA Director
Each
boxing match is a story: a drama without words. Alberto García-Alix´s
photographs are also condensed stories, silent but eloquent stories.
These are images imbued with a lyricism and stripped of artifice,
poetry that always finds a place to settle within the framework: the
tension in the foreshortening of a face, the tip of a shoe, a
skewered vagina, the body of a bird, fuzzy profiles of a building …
Direct poetry that explodes before our eyes with the radiance of a
whiplash.
A
vocational fighter, when García Alix concludes one of his joyful
battles with images, there is only one winner standing on the
canvas: his glance. A frontal view. A look of fighter. Pure epic.
García-Alix´s
technique has evolved toward a meticulous use of black and white. His
visual speech is composed in accordance with the maps that his life’s
itinerary has sketched out, maps onto which the photographer sketches
his mysterious, emotional and compelling artistic cartography.
A broad map on which objects and landscapes appear, photographs in
which Alberto García-Alix captures the scenes of his own biography:
houses, streets, roads and trails open up to infinity. Walls, facades
and windows bounded by the camera lens. Open spaces on which his gaze
jumps around and becomes introspective until enclosing itself in the
four walls of a bare room.
If
someone put us in the difficult situation of having to choose only
one of the topics dealt with by García-Alix in his work, that which
summarizes its totality, that would be the human body. Its flesh,
bones, and also the light that hides in its gut. And in the end,
inescapably, the fight is bound be a body-to-body between Alberto and
the light.
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