The galerie Temple presents Ricardo Cases‘s El porqué de las naranjas through June 20th, 2015. Cases started El porqué de las naranjas – which translates loosely as the reason of oranges while living in Valencia. «One of the symbols of the Levante region – the eastern side of the Iberian Peninsula on the Mediterranean coast – is oranges, but also tourism and construction. I needed to start something really open, so as a starting point I chose this question: el porqué de las naranjas.» (…)
In Naranjas everything seems worn, held together by pieces of string or planks of wood. Everything seems out of place, not quite as it should be, illogical. This lends a sense of absurdity to the book; the idea that the people, the buildings, the palm trees and the cars don’t really belong there. Cases uses the orange as a narrative device to highlight this sense of absurdity. He photographs a coast under attack from a kind of topographical skin disease – a landscape suffering from a rash, ulcers and boils. It flakes and it suppurates. It’s dried up, dead. Repeated images of palms show them wilting under the attack of weevil infestation, and an overexposed colour palette replicates the intensity of high-noon heat in midsummer.
– Colin Pantall
lauching of Ricardo Cases’s book Podría Haberse Evitadode on Friday 19th June, 2015 from 6pm:
When trust is broken, everything turns suspicious forever. It Could Have Been Avoided arises from that collective mood —so predominant in Spain nowadays— in order to outline the portrait of a territory in which, suddenly, everybody is suspicious.
The daily life of Énova (Valencia, Spain) acquires a different meaning when it is photographed using a detective-like language: scenes are captured with a zoom lens from a certain height and each image is accompanied by a written description of what it has been seen.
Photography works here as a proof of an alleged crime we don’t really know about, and the photographer’s obsessive attitude erases little by little any sense of reality in a sequence of images that, in the end, are no other than a documentary about a Spanish town observed through the filter of suspicion.
Born in Orihuela, Alicante (Spain) in 1971, he holds a BA in Sciences of Information from the Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao.
«Ricardo Cases photographic work focuses on the yearnings of the human being: the deep and universal longings of the citizen of the mass society, fighting against banality in an effort to transcend, confronting his own dignity with a medium always untrustworthy. To this end, he turns his eye to expressions of contemporary folklore, looking for the truth of the Spaniard: a townsman who is forced to live in the city, in modernity. Beyond a pop appearance distant and cynical he is interested in what is human and anthropological. Beyond the social and documentary, he searches for the truthful and universal pulsations beating beneath the banal surface often kitsch and lacking glamour of contemporary Spain». Luis López Navarro
In 2006, he joined the Blank Paper Photography Collective. Since 2007, he develops his work as a teacher in Blank Paper School, in the European Institute of Design (Madrid, Spain) and in EFTI (Madrid, Spain). In 2008, he created with the designer Natalia Troitiño Fiesta Ediciones and since 2013, he’s a member of the AMPARO platform.
He has published the books Belleza de barrio (Universidad de Extremadura, 2008) , La caza del lobo congelado (Fiesta Ediciones / Universidad de Cadiz, 2009), Paloma al aire (Photovision / Schaden-Dewi Lewis, 2011) and El porqué de las naranjas (Mack, 2014).
EXHIBITION
El porqué de las naranjas
by Ricardo Cases
From May 14th to June 20th, 2015
Temple
20 rue de la corderie
75003 Paris
from Thursday to Saturday,
3 —7 pm and by appointment.
EVENT
Lauching of Podría Haberse Evitado
Photographs by Ricardo Cases
Published by Temple and Dalpine
Friday 19th June, from 6pm
Meeting with the artist
