Carla Nicolas
A Spanish visual artist, her work is mainly centered on printmaking and the book as an object, although during her residency at Casa de Velázquez, she also integrated the installation as a form of artistic expression. A printer by profession, she has been developing her practice since 2011 at Calotipo, a studio for the creation and printing of handicrafts, where she also carries out commercial orders for individuals and businesses.
“I included photography in my practice to develop photopolymer engravings. What interests me is the combination of digital techniques with the traditional engraving, because it allows to collect nuances impossible to reach through the use of only traditional technique. In addition, the process of stamping can also be altered according to the cleanliness of the plate and thus bring to light nuances that the digital printing does not allow. Obtaining an intense black tone means that the technique itself brings richness to the image. – Carla Nicolas
Mathieu Lucas
Mathieu Lucas is an architect and landscape designer, he graduated in 2012 from the National Superior Architecture Academy of Versailles. He develops his personal practice between the design of landscaped spaces, urban mastery and artistic research on the modes of representation of the living, the natural cycles and the climatic processes to imagine and glimpse everywhere new forms of cohabitations between man and the environment.
“I have always been very inspired by Mario Giacomelli’s photographs where landscapes become games of textures, frames, points, on the edge of Land Art. I am also very inspired by the highly structured frameworks of Luigi Ghirri and Guido Guidi. Periurban landscapes seeming to be somewhat arbitrary are transformed and revealed by composition and geometry. I am sensitive to the documentary value, the trace left by photography and its ability to produce a story. My practice of photography thus seeks to catch a condition of an a priori innocuous site to look for a narrative, a reality still hidden on which to work. I was able to explore for example the landscapes of the Roman suburbs in search of encounters between mineral and vegetable, between gray and green, or the transformation of the Mediterranean landscape by the presence of so-called invasive plants in historic parks . Photography is for me a tool, in addition to video and cartography, to document and reveal situations still unnoticed through the game of framing and selection. – Mathieu Lucas
