During

 

During. Collage of Printing and Photographic Transfers on Fabric 300 x 200 cm. 2024

If we observe the lines on our hands, there are no vertical ones.

I have constructed a hand traversed from the index finger to the wrist by a large seam, from which portraits transferred onto fabric emerge—images of my face and that of my family over decades.

A constellation of lines on a white wall, some letters, each seemingly initials.

Several people have measured themselves against the wall, marked the line of their height at that moment, and placed their initials; as if they were countries on a map, they have marked their borders.

Since I was in a classroom, I thought these marks might belong to students who are used to measuring themselves on the walls of their homes. People who inscribed their hopes or their desire to transcend their boundaries, a certain nostalgia for a lost centre.

Our intimate self includes the childhood of the past.

The palm of the hand is an involuntary summary of our history—how we grasp things, how we hold on to avoid falling. That hand is built along with us, reaching for the other hands around us.

Like any collage, it visually creates bonds that connect the images, while at the same time maintaining the cracks that separate them. The seams seek to link differences, creating a tension—a union-separation similar to what happens in the skin when a wound forms.

The difference in scale between the images enables a mental rather than spatial relationship among them, allowing them to serve as an index of events in search of temporal order.

We shed our skin during the winter 27 x 35 cm

Transfers on fabric and photographic prints on paper January-April 2025

This is part of a series of collages with images created during the "During" process and which mark the beginning of a new body of work, "Family Ties." It represents a shift from constructing visual relationships with a primarily intellectual interaction of images to a more spatial construction, like different actors on a stage.

The protagonist is the home and the situations we experience within it: from the most banal, the seasonal change of clothes in the closet, to the most profound, evoked by the faded image behind it and the faces transferred onto the fabrics, which are metaphors for inner change over time.

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.

Linktree https://linktr.ee/mariajosegomezredondo

https://mariajosegomezredondo.wordpress.com

Blog https://arteyproceso.blogspot.com/

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.

More information

The Spanish Vision 1990

The Spanish Vision: Contemporary art Photography.
The Spanish Institute. New York 1990

María José Gómez 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 guess from these depictions _ and the one which forms a part of her technique along with the other, more apparent ones.

George L.Aguirre
Guest Curator

The sense of vision

The sense of taste

  The sense of hearing

 The sense of smell

The sense of touch