Foto Colectania presents ‘Desde Dentro (From the Inside)’, the introspective gaze of seven Spanish photographers.
With this exhibition Foto Colectania delved into the work of some of the artists of its collection that used introspection as an essential point to their gazes and photographic paths. More than looking for some common stylistic features, the exhibition focuses on seven authors who have concentrated their search in exploring the nature of photography, not only to capture reality but as a tool to unleash the imagination. “From the inside” shows 85 photographs of Vari Caramés, Toni Catany, Gabriel Cualladó, Ferran Freixa, Alberto García-Alix, Paco Gomez and Humberto Rivas all from the Foto Colectania Collection.
“From the inside. Photographs from the Foto Colectania Collection” offers a tour of a new photographic approach that showed up in the seventies and walked away from documentary photography, to claim a more intimate and poetic vision of images. As the photography historian Jean-Claude Lemagny said, there are some authors for whom the camera becomes a window from which photographers can extract their inner world: “beyond sentimental confessions, it’s all about questioning the ways of art and its traditional boundaries.” In this exhibition, the selection of authors who represent this trend is as important as the resonances that can be established between their works, with their conceptual approaches, overlapping aesthetics and personal affinities.
Ferran Freixa (Barcelona, 1950) and Humberto Rivas
(Buenos Aires, 1937 – Barcelona, 2009), from their architectural specialty and from their teaching work, they shared creative and personal affinities. They both felt a great fascination for spaces that transmit stillness and corners where the light is the protagonist. Although Freixa’s and Rivas’ choice in the treatment of the light shows two different photographic styles, both cases show work as a reflection of oneself.
Toni Catany
(Llucmajor, 1942) has a long and prolific work that began in the late sixties and that was developed from a relentless experimentation with various photographic processes and from different genres: still life, portraiture and travelling. He belongs to the generation of photographers of the Spanish Transition that had the intention of renewing photography and wanted to feel a freedom of being “unapologetic creators”. In the field of Spanish photography, Catany has been also a pioneer in valuing the quality of a print (the photograph as an object to be exhibited and collected). Thus, we can find works such as Natura morta, No. 159 or his calotype Chevreul Homage from 1979, which has become one of his most recognized icons.
”From the inside” reveals the apparently improvised and fleeting language of
Vari Caramés
(Ferrol, 1953), which refers to what has been called “gesture photography” and to his belief that photography is not only testimony of the external reality but also of one’s own environment, of one’s own interior. The shift he made from white and black to full color in 1999 wisely kept his own language and the essence of his photographic universe. Caramés also has the ability to create evocative images based on energetic brushstrokes that immerse the viewer in environments strangely familiar.
As a background to this new poetic attitude of the photographers of this exhibition, which began in the late seventies, we find the work of
Gabriel Cualladó
(Massanassa, 1925 – Madrid, 2003) and Paco Gómez
(Pamplona, 1918 – Madrid, 1998). Since the 50s and 60s, these two photographers conducted group exhibitions and felt the need to photograph in a slower and more relaxed way than their contemporaries. Cualládo’s work highlights the distilled influence of international classics and an extraordinary ability to make a close and direct portrait that contrasts to the hardness of the developing of his prints, which gives to his pictures a characteristic halo of fantasy. A feature he shares with Paco Gomez, who often achieves that a real object gets into the field of imagination with just setting a detail or framing a wall.
The exhibition also focuses on the figure of
Alberto García-Alix
(León, 1956), whose work investigates the border of art and life with strong autobiographical strokes. This personal approach has allowed him to observe through the camera “as he had never done before,” to look through it shading and shutting itself. Considered one of the greatest contemporary Spanish photographers at an international level, his photographs claim the “conscious, lucid and sensitive use of the camera,” under a relentless and courageous way of seeing that he defines as “the gaze of a boxer”. Thus, the photographs selected for this exhibition discover a particularly intimate, evocative and dreamlike García-Alix, although some of his big icons are also there.
From the Inside
From 4/6/2013 until 21/9/2013
Fundació Foto Colectania
Julián Romea, 6
08017 Barcelona
Spain
Opening hours :
Monday to saturday from 11:00 to 14:00 and from 16:00 to 20:00
Admission fee : 3 €
