Paz would have loved this girl. Her true inner joy jumping from the eyes like a bouncy puppy with a frisky tail. A kind hearted woman in a tight black dress like liquid licorice candy.
She had the appearance of a trompe-l’oeil, emerging from the dirty walls, coming out from nowhere through an inexistent door. And if in that very moment Paz had been there and the dj played Cherry Coloured Funk, I’m pretty sure she would have asked the girl to dance.
Sometimes I wonder why she is unable to leave her fortress and come to visit us and join me in these safaris, instead of sharing our lives only through photos and mails. Why she thinks they are truer than life itself, and if that statement of hers is really a compliment or just an excuse to remain detached and disconnected.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Trompe-l'oeil
A case of intimacy
The convenience and facility of digital photography has totally changed the photographer’s sense of commitment, and plagued the media of mere noise and marginalia profusely documented.
The trivia of everything is sucking the essence of life itself, in its most ineffable, ungraspable parts: those that can trigger the relevant questions and move us towards personal and creative expansion.
What made the fields, the rose and the fox special was not their nature of field, rose, and fox but the blossoming love of the Little Prince. It was (it is) a case of intimacy. Lawrence Durrell, in his Alexandria Quartet wrote that one can love a city only because a loved one lives in it. This is so true, and can be extrapolated to every place and moment in the world.
That’s how art acquires transcendence.
If you close your eyes, and look at this photograph, you’ll hear one of David Sylvian’s songs sweetly and sadly eroding my heart, soothing my mind from trouble, doubt and trouble and you’ll be able to touch the skin of the dawn or the sunset.
I will print it for you realize that all this too much, too fast, too many, too soon you are seeking for comfort is preventing you from noticing how close you are to the source of all wonder in its most pure form and simplicity.
My purpose is to make it tangible for you.
You’ll never imagine how committed I am to drag this beauty, all the beauty of the world to your door. Now.
It is baffling, overwhelming, almost impalpable, transient. And it’s yours to embrace. It’s my offering, my votive contribution, my alms fee, the ashes of time at the borders of what makes us one rather than us alone, or you, or me.
Evidence of the dearly departed
I saw several bodies missing from their shoes that night.
It was funny to notice how willing they were to go barefoot, or naked or disappear.
And how disturbing the symbols of their sadness were left behind, like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs or as a proof that they once existed.
Every shoe reflected the personality of the departed.
People say that dogs and owners share their facial features.
I say that shoes are even more accurate regarding human character.
Angstlust
They pretend they’re having a great time, and they are, actually, in a perplexing contradictory manner: getting a big deal of pleasure from angst itself.
They seem to be aloof even from each other, although deeply focused on the efficient setting of the script, their part in the play, the image-based definition of whatever they believe about who they are and where they are going (motionless, maybe, stuck in time, and stuck in purpose).
I move around, dwelling in my invisibility, asking myself if unlimited eyes are enough to grasp what’s going on beyond the trivial, the false, the futile, asking myself what is connected to what in the room, struggling to surrender to the surroundings. Struggling despite the spirits I’ve conjured, running away from the ghosts of memory, striping off the layers of significance, imagining what would it be like to add or to remove any of the figures from the scene, just like limp figures in a wax museum, and in that blissful moment I find the elusive feeling of the right place, right moment, shivering through my veins, and I take the photo empty of thought, empty of guessing, not even concerned about if the whole act drop will still be holding your mind a second after your glance departed the frame. And I’m perfectly ok if it isn’t. Perfectly ok with that.
Red kiss
Fierce beauties, red kiss, drunk nights of weirdness and enchantment, a ticket to Wonderland from time to time, cabaret romance, nostalgic longing in foreign eyes, death defying nihilists dancing with a fag between their fingers, entitled gothic dominatrix, and lick-shoe submissive big boys with
ducktail hair style, a troupe of crepuscular creatures, a blank memory card, Delia’s warmth in bed at dawn when coming home, the smiling faces of my daughters right before passing out without brushing my teeth. These are what I stay alive for.
Spider and I (take two)
In the messy and mirrorless warehouse serving as a dressing room, the goddess enhances her bangs brushing thin locks of dyed hair and shaking a funky bottle of Chinese hairspray, frostily ignoring my presence while I find an angle for the shot.
She sits straight and proud on a chair way smaller than her broad fanny. The bosom is overpouring a black satin corset that somehow shapes an inexistent waistline.
Now that she isn’t exactly posing, I am able to appreciate the appeal of her face, the grounded, arrogant, perky and Beth Ditto-like attitude.
The vanished owner of the shoes comes to my mind. I imagine his hands lost in such abundance, his lips kissing the point end of her boots and the stilettos scratching his back.
And suddenly, I also see them both, naked from these costumes, in native buff, all the flesh blissfully delivered from playing the part and from the glossy tight fabrics, eating pizza and watching television on a wide bed, cuddling, smiling, vulnerable, with no need or urge to prove nothing or to make any virtue of their flaws. And I feel close, and warmhearted for a moment, until she gets up, looking at me, entitled to submissive reverence.
Chasing the stallions of ennui
Some people seem to be just a space of resonance. The aimless, dismal and wild stallions of Ennui. The camera is drawn to them as to the void. There’s music surrounding the dreamy and self- absorbed dance, but as it touches the skin, the thoroughly sculpted hair, it blows up into quiet pieces and the atmosphere resembles the delirious, hot and touch-needy effect of doing ecstasy. I move around, holding the camera with a quavering hand and a tall glass of spirits in the other one. I need to go to the rest room, but it’s crowded with gothic girls making over their makeups, dudes in amorous dalliance against the walls or snorting coke like crazy. The three endeavors are done with bizarre nerve and sinew, so I decide to wait, acting considerate and discreet as always, if holding the need to pee, a glass and a camera at the same time can be considered considerate and discreet at all. The scenario is stirring, and arousing, the guy with the white rolled up sleeves is now smoking a cigarette, but he has not stopped dancing to light it and the sparkles spread through the solid air. If I didn’t give up smoking, I would ask him for one, or to share it with me, but I prefer watching the trance from the edges than letting myself drown in evanescence to the hilt.
Erebus
Marshall Mc Luhan said that historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
He forgot to mention night dens, freak ghettos, uptown districts, where ageless, disturbed and disturbing creatures seem to be the same ones that inhabited caverns of iniquity in early Las Vegas or García Alix’s photos during the reckless years of La Movida.
They love posing, they smell of opium smoke and incense, they shamelessly show up their histrionic brilliance, they calculate my poundage in blood, and hold my stare as I hide behind the camera, drunk and happy as ever.