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.

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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