The verses glued to the eyes.

By María José Gómez Redondo

"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

  "Traces of Time" By María José Gómez Redondo

This work began in 1999, and it is still ongoing.

I printed several photos and sentences on different kinds of paper and fabric, then glued them onto slates. These slates were pieces taken from a roof covering. They feature self-portraits layered over portraits of my family members.

I glued the materials in layers, one on top of another, and over time, some parts were partially erased by rubbing or simply by the passage of time. I have placed these images on fine-grained, black metamorphic rock that naturally splits into smooth, flat pieces. Both the images and their support gradually lose layers, much like the text itself. The words are stripped away, inviting the viewer to complete their meaning through the remaining fragments and overlapping phrases.

I enjoy working with photographs, seeing them not only as representations but also as tangible objects with their own physical presence. Their gradual deterioration becomes a metaphor for the passage of time, for forgetting, and for memory itself.

Visually, they remind me of Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings, in which the artist recycles fragments of American collective memory into alternative narratives, disconnected from a linear sense of history. His ethereal drawings merge scraps of printed media with hand-drawn and painted passages. Similarly, my intention is to create pictorial poems that subtly reflect the excesses of contemporary visual culture. In my case, my work documents my own self-representations over time, revealing my aging process.

Paradoxically, the slates seem to me like Paleolithic mobile screens, carrying messages that echo today’s social networks.

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

Claude Monet: my garden would be an inspirational place.

By María José Gómez Redondo

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  by María José Gómez Redondo

 

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

By María José Gómez Redondo

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

Elements

By María José Gómez Redondo

More than emotion, I want to assert a claim to the suggestion, which is a kind of bridge between reason and unreason.

Her work titled "Ether" (1993) belongs to a series on the different elements, photographs in which the artist searches though motifs for asociaciones shown between a central nucleus and the rest of the surface of the photo, between proximity and distance, focus and lack of focus.
She is aware that in her works she is looking for spectators' engagement. This is why she uses fragments and gives clues though keeping areas of mystery:"It is thee way you place things in front of camera what transform them. This is why I take care of reorganizing what I photograph, why I choose the place and particular distance".

"Ether"

"Earth"

"Fire"

"Air"

"Water"

Spanish Vision

Maria José Gomez Redondo uses appropriations, double exposures and montages to create a dream-like work in which no monsters are allowed. In the series of her photographs in The Spanish Vision, she depicts the five senses, leaving the "sixth" sense to be deduced from these depictions-and the one which forms a part of her technique along with the other, more apparent ones.

"The sense of vision"

"the sense of touch"

"The sense of smell"

"The sense of hearing"

"The sense of taste"

In her first one-person show in December 1990 at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. María José Gómez Redondo (Valladolid 1963) presented two kind of works: allegories of the senses and series of still-lifes with classical connections. Two series which can be taken as premonitory examples of the sort of work she has been developing since then, in which there is an inclination to tell stories mixed with subtle sensuality, translated into images, thanks to a precise control of the onlooker distance. She talks about it when she remembers her beginnings, when she used to paint: "After completing some photographic works in 1987 with Luis Mayo, I became so interested in that medium that I could not abandon it thought I concentrated my interest in photographing photos that I has seen in the press. I was convinced that art was closely related with 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 decided to combined them, trying to raise the one which always left behind, hidden"

References:

The Spanish Vision: Contemporary Art Photography 1970-1990