Archaeology of the invisible.

Since our childhood we have been attracted to empty mansions, places that show in their ruins the remains of their former uses, places inhabited by treasures and ghosts. I remember having visited powerful places of industrial archaeology in Segovia, old brick factories, electricity factories, photographic laboratories or the Faience Factory, all of them empty and open to adolescent curiosity.

I still have some of the treasures I found there: an architect's tape measure, some negatives of military photographs on gelatine and glass.

I also remember my desire to photograph ghosts with long shutter exposures in places lit by torchlight.

This space of the abattoir of Monzón de Campos is a space saved from collapse as were not those others, which I remember with the affection reserved for an old acquaintance. However, this space is also open to memory. Elements of industrial archaeology emerge, questioning its new use, this new coexistence with art, which always allows us to invoke what is outside our limits.

Collage as an artistic technique is both a tool of destruction and creation; it is the first attempt at sustainable, recycled art. These stones are assemblages of images on building rubble that are placed on the ground to invent a future or a past time. 

Nature occupies the artificial space when people leave, which is why I look down on this room, which could be invaded by the countryside around it. The tiles show us a space that wants to look clean, as opposed to the dirt that comes from the beings that live and die. The ceramics have that air of improved nature that does not resist returning to the earth, but retains the brightness of what was once its function.

I pick up rationalist squares from the tiled walls to frame my family ties like those traced in white kitchens and bathrooms like this room.

I enjoy working with photographs as representations of something and as objects in themselves. Their deterioration becomes a metaphor for the passage of time, oblivion and memory. I recycle images, phrases, poems, creating new texts, initially separated from a linear narrative. These ethereal photographs recover fragments of printed media. I did this to construct pictorial poems that subtly reflect the excesses of contemporary visual culture. In my case, my work reflects my self-representations over time and my aging process. The blackboards, paradoxically, look to me like paleolithic mobile screens with their social media messages.

Vertical garden

 Vertical garden, Maria Jose Gomez Redondo September 2022

Being all expelled from Paradise, we miss the garden and grow another to keep it in the human sphere; it offers us found rest through a piece of nature contact.

Maria Jose Gomez Redondo fits her vertical garden to enjoy limited vegetation and isolated from its environment, which is offered to observation meanwhile growing to assume the difficulties of a hostile location. This artwork represents a humanized jungle gifted with an odd disposition that depicts a map or a drawing made for contemplation.

She presents photographs made in several supports: fabric, collage in which printed, dyed, and photochemical images, they are mixed and showing us a close-up panorama from the recent years of the artist.

Water Flowers (2013- 2022) is a collage series that roll us back to childhood games: these flowers seem to dance floating in a pond with many reflections; colourful rainbows that we had seen for the first time in an oil stain in a puddle.

Shadow Flowers (2021) is a seven photograph series made on fabric in which small stems appear to wave in sheets wrapping themselves in their own shadow; they are winter pictures where the darkness looks for artificial light causing a mystery sensation.

Paper Flowers (2005) are collages that review the photographic image condition; the flowers suffer a mix of re-photographic processes: They became from natural to artificial living in a parallel reality like Bioy Casares’ short story “la invención de Morel.”

Vertical Garden: Winter and summer (2021) are two mural photographs printed on fabric, on which the artist self-portraits in her vertical garden as a background curtain; she offers us a theatrical garden that impersonates to be a forest; she prepared a grove to turn into a playground and imaginary encounters.

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The verses glued to the eyes.

"The invisible is not dark or the mysterious but the transparent" Marcel Duchamp in "Naked appearance"by Octavio Paz.

Some times our words transform what we see. It is as if we carry them glued to our eyes.

A word linked to a part of the image with a thin connection, associated with others, is a metaphor.

 Sometimes the sentences hide reality, but others show it twisted like a cord.

In this last work, I resort to horizontal compositions where my face and hand appear connected in a diffuse space reproduced by double photographic exposure and digital mixing of texts and images.

 I will arrange the photos in a future montage online. To be able to be contemplated some superimposed on others.

Using these semitransparent fabrics, I have resorted to experimenting with overprinted visualization. I had experienced before using other means: double exposure, glossy finishes that emit reflections, and collages with prints made on waxed paper. However, I had never previously exhibited any wall photos printed on a veil.

This piece has a good view of the rear even though we are not able to read it. I have the project of making an exhibition of this work next year.

Verses glued to the eyes

Stitches in the clouds

threads of thought

this veiled image brings me to the memory of Doris Salcedo's work in the MOMA

Verses on slates

 Verses on slates:

This work began in 1999, and it has not finished yet.

I printed several photos and sentences over different kinds of paper and fabric and glued them over slates.  I  took these pieces from covering a roof. They are self-portraits pasted on my family members’ portraits.

I glued it in layers one over another,  erased it partially by the time or rubbing. I have placed them to a fine-grained black metamorphic rock easily split into smooth, flat pieces. The images and support lose layers,  like the text.  It is stripped of words and seeks to complete its meaning with the other layers of phrases.

I enjoy working on photographs, considering them both as representations of something objects turn with their corporeity this way. Their deterioration becomes a metaphor for the passage of time, forgetting, and memory.

Visually they remind me of Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings. The artist recycles an American collective memory into alternative narratives disengaged from a linear history. These ethereal drawings reclaim scraps of printed media combined with hand-drawn and painted passages. I did it to make pictorial poems that subtly reflect the excesses of contemporary visual culture. In my case, my work would depict my self-representations along time and my aging process..

Slates paradoxically seem to me paleolithic mobile screens with their messages on social Networks.

Claude Monet: my garden would be an inspirational place.

When I was ordering my plant pots, I thought it is my favorite place to work. I wished I would create an innovative artwork about this scene.

Immediately, Monet’s Giverny garden came to my mind. It was gorgeous. Not only because had it offered a beautiful subject for his paintings also it was visually inspirational.  It is a break-through, an innovation view.

Monet made  The Water lilies in the last decade of the long life. Their power is not only of inspiration stroke but of an enduring passion, both for the artist’s subject and his vocation. 

As a photographer, I have been interested in knowing the sight process and how we think that we watch. Even when Monet’s paintings are encountered one at a time, the artist’s environmental vision is apparent in their magnitude, and, more important, in their scale vis-à-vis an individual’s perception.

Surface and reflection could be questions for an artist who wants to capture a plant in the water. He focused tightly on the water surface. Monet succeeded in making paintings that convert the viewer’s role from observation to immersion.  From the outset, the artist envisaged them as all-encompassing. 

María José Gómez Redondo, "hugs and verses" 2020

María José Gómez Redondo, "hands in the water" 2013

 

Claude Monet 

Water Lilies, 1914–26
Oil on canvas, three panels, each 6' 6 3/4" x 13' 11 1/4" (200 x 424.8 cm); overall 6' 6 3/4" x 41' 10 3/8" (200 x 1,276 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

 

If you want to know what is the legacy of Monet’s garden to the Modern painting you should read this article:

Ann Temkin and Nora Lawrence. Claude Monet: Water Lilies. The Museum of Modern Art, 2009.

Her self-portrait

 Time-stretched self-portrait

 

Berenice Abbott. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Negative c. 1930/distortion c. 1950

I was looking for self-portraits made by women artists and found an article in https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/256. A guide to five powerful self-portraits in the MoMA collection

I felt shocked by this. Berenice could not have influenced my work because I did not know her work when I started to do my photos.

This picture gets several things that engage me:

- The photo is the result of two shots: one in 1930 and the other in 1950. It might connect with the concept of Delay in Duchamp.

- The distorted face connects with the combination of various cubism views and distortions in surreal images. The taking of photos also connects with the press images taken by the POP movement, Andy Warhol art, and with the concept of appropriation in post-modernity.

This self-portrait places Berenice in three positions: model, photographer, and spectator of her image. She said about the picture: I like this picture so well because it re-creates some of the feelings I got from the original scene, and that is the real test of any image. Berenice Abbott, 1953.

When I start to do my artwork, I concentrated my interest in photographing photos that I have seen in the press. I believed that art has closely related to the exercise of learning to watch. I soon realized that not far from the image we see, there is another one, which is less stable, which seems to be moving, and I decided to combine them, trying to raise the one which is always left behind, hidden.

The photographer Berenice Abbott chose to distort her face in this self-portrait, a contrarian response to rigid beauty ideals for women.  It also evokes a sense of vulnerability in a moment of sweeping technological and social change following World War I.

By warping the paper under the enlarger, Abbott emphasized her eyes that she looks like a cat. Her fascination with the flexible inscription of reality in photography overrode vanity. However, the distorted face is still recognizably hers-described at the time as a face with no edges, boy-cut hair, and kewpie eyes.

We both throw the formal construction of the images posed as related fragments are made very clear. Pieces of paper, transfers on the photographic emulsion, imprints on different supports,  I make the image acquire a technical depth in keeping with its visual complexity.

Face, diptych, photography printed over the fabric. 1 m length 1.50 width 

María José Gómez Redondo 1999

SELF-PORTRAITS THROUGH OTHERS

It was my photographic intervention at the Carabanchel Penal Institution, December 1994, Madrid. 

Only a few artists invited to create our work in a prison, it was about turning the jail into a forum for cutting edge art. Concha Jerez, Nacho Criado, Pepe Iges, Isidoro Valcarcel Medina, and other young artists, we came up with projects that could be developed in confinement circumstances with convicts who wanted to participate.

We proposed to reflection on the role of art in segregated and excluded territories It was about fostering a meeting, and a mutual surprise that of the artist who comes from outside, and that of the inmate who is invited to work.

Before our meeting, I asked myself a question: when I draw or photograph a face do I represent my face, without intending to, about the one I am trying to portray? This could be connected with the concept of empathy: the child responds to his mother's smile and imitating his gesture, he interprets the face of the closest person. For empathy when we make a portrait, we project our appearance on other faces. 

A turning point in this project was in the first prison visit, I found unforeseen lighting circumstances, in a closed place, without natural light, we improvised a spotlight with the slide projector. 

Presenting my work as a collaboration proposal, I asked the inmates for help and, I showed them images of me that provided information on the future results. Besides, I touched on some technical and personal aspects that could connect with their concerns as image-creating photographers inside the enclosure. I was interested in showing that it was possible to construct images in a small space and somewhat precarious circumstances to elaborate own language. They accepted my proposal.

Firstly I thought to include my hand in the image; but finally, I decided, during the development of the on-site work, their hand should appear, with an object that I carried, they chose. We would make a half portrait or a double portrait: my face and his hand. Their hands, and my face, all the same, but different, became a challenge for those who see the images. You can see many things on the hand: the footprints, the age, the future, the past too.

As you might know, I carefully wrote down who had taken each photograph, and whose hand it was. With this material, I continued working in the studio. I took nine photographs, one for each portrait taken in prison (nine were the participants: six prisoners and three educators) in the first phase, until obtaining satisfactory results. 

I went back to jail and showed them the first evidence. I thought it is necessary to improve the quality of the results regarding sharpness and color and continued working in my studio. I took about 15 new pictures for each portrait. About 120 pictures. I made nine mural portraits of 100cm x 150cm, mounted, and screwed on methacrylate. 

Although initially, the formal approaches were clear, the results obtained surprised me: my face was always smiling (in the photos, I had taken in my previous work, the appearance was serene, very calm). 

 However, this face in prison with a smile showed a complex emotional situation. The lighting was extremely dramatic; the shadow-light relationship turns the objects, face, and hand into appearances and contributes to giving a formal definition of the face and the different hand. Hands look like faces, faces look like hands. Is it the left or the right side? Is it a face or profile face?

References: María José Gómez Redondo Aperture Magazine Spring 1999