Colecciones de arte

Trajectory

This artist team is considered to be one of the few currently working in Spain who produce work that can really be considered to have a single author. The two artists forming this team were trained as photographers at the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas y Diseño in Valencia, the city in which they currently live and work.

The way they approach their images, aseptically producing portraits of places, choosing the essence of traces remaining in spaces that were once lived in, their work is directly related to the German school of new objectivity, initiated by Bernd and Hilla Becher in Düsseldorf and to which some of the most outstanding names within the contemporary art world belong. Their work is structured in repetitive series on certain specific themes, developed in different and consecutive settings, and their projects encompass a look at the spaces where things have occurred, from the most trivial to the most relevant, approached systematically by establishing formal criteria a priori, among which there is no room for the strictly anecdotal. They use the camera as a conceptual instrument, a sort of topographical tool outlining and marking the framework of memory, places in which pain, success, triumph or defeat have been experienced. Spaces once full of action and feeling that now in their pictures appear empty and solitary, far from their times of glory and misery. The images they capture belong to a veiled narration, a network of associations of ideas and experiences, a dialogue emerging between the present images and what occurred there in the past.

Their first project was Campos de fútbol, a series of black-and-white photographs depicting solitary local football fields where one can still hear the cheers from the crowd and the players' voices, although all that is really left is a rusty old goal post. These are anonymous places, without any references to their location. Their history is insignificant and nothing out of the ordinary ever occurred there. This project is the starting point for what would become a much more ambitions project, Campos de batalla, both due to its lyricism and to the complexity of the discourse it implies. In addition to the images, the accompanying titles allude to the great battles that took place in Spain. These highly suggestive photographs disguised as documents permit us to reflect on time, absence and memory.

Their most recent work is Ciudades (2000) in which they portray fragments of Iberian, Celtic, Roman, Greek and Phoenician cities founded in Antiquity on the Iberian Peninsula. Cities that no longer exist, and of which all that remains are a few small fragments, legends and myths; thus introducing a new element into viewing, the imagination, which is necessary for completing these ruins. These cities are the origins of contemporary cultures, places marked by memory. The titles are also descriptive, allowing us to identify, evoke and instil with new meaning those pieces of rock and those barren enclaves. C. D.