Chema Madoz has opened the photographic season of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid with his exhibition ‘Crueldad’, a new revision of his work away from the poetics to which he had us accustomed. It is the same work, but from a different perspective that seems to make it more interesting.
Within current Spanish photography, Chema Madoz is one of the heavyweights. In addition, his style is totally recognizable and impossible to imitate. He was able to find a unique and inimitable way of looking.
It is true that drink from various sources to look for, from surrealism to Ramón Gómez de la Serna, but he has formed a universe from which he has never emerged. If you like it, follow me; if not, there is no problem. This is what he seems to say with his photographs that we see over and over again.
Already there is nothing new in his work. Many of us are no longer surprised, but we continue to stare with our mouths open at the visual greguerías that he proposes, even though they are already part of the everyday landscape.
For this reason, the new exhibition of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, in which Commissioners Juan Barja and Patxi Lanceros have been able to offer a new reading of the shots they no longer have the attention of the first meeting.
This was the first USB memory in history
The cruelty of Chema Madoz
The challenge seemed difficult. Chema Madoz has always been related to visual poetry, to insinuation and things without apparent meaning. For him an object always had another answer, another utility other than the one we know. A visual poem.
But this time they have managed to make that innocent, candid and direct air disappear from their photographs and they have taken it to the opposite side. At a dark point of which the author himself was aware, but did not see that anyone dared to insinuate.
It is true that they have had to resort, at times, to the words of conceptual authors that have nothing to say with photography:
The exemplary fixity of what we see in each of those projections, constructions, objective montages – the acute rigor of their nuances, of the shadows and lights of the bodies that are present there, that are already shown ‘with a present body ‘to the gaze– induces chain reactions: creation as cre-action, in which what is different is paired and, instead, what was unitary and common dissolves –it seemed so …–. Or the same thing read in another way: the succession of its analogies – the similarity in the dissimilar – explodes the nucleus of the image that is articulated in / by the differences that reveal / unveil what was, even hidden, concrete, noticeable.
They have gotten us to look at their photographs from the other side. And this new prism greatly enriches the work of Chema Madoz. He is no longer the smiling, polite photographer we are used to seeing. It has a wonderful and tantalizing dark side. His innocence is irony and his poems are blows to the stomach.
He is no longer the smiling, polite photographer we are used to seeing. It has a wonderful and tantalizing dark side. His innocence is irony and his poems are blows to the stomach.
In total they are seventy-three photographs in the exhibition and one hundred and two in the catalog that will be a bestseller. With very few unpublished images. Perfect black and white, pristine, made with natural light from his studio that does not look like a photographer, but a sculptor.
And they have added, to ‘open possibilities of meanings from each work’, texts by famous authors to each of the photographs through a QR code. Those who do not know how to get the information will miss it. And it’s a good idea, but I think it enormously complicates a job as open to interpretation as Chema Madoz’s.
Your photos need no explanation, just a personal interpretation. Putting authors as diverse as Dante, Cesar Vallejo, Federico García Lorca, Samuel Beckett, GWF Hegel, only intellectualizes some images that belonged to everyone and that all they need is for us to look at them.
You have to go see the exhibition. If we want, we can avoid contaminating texts, so we can see all the photographs without limits (a good idea after all, the QR code) but always under the new prism of cruelty. And I assure you that they enjoy themselves again. You will tell us …
- Chema Madoz ‘Cruelty’
- Sala Picasso Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid
- 16.09.2021> 21.11.2021
- General admission € 5