La belleza desnuda de las cosas, la mirada íntima y a la vez universal.
Escribo estas líneas escuchando a Antonio Vega. Como en tantas otras ocasiones en que sus manos huesudas trazaban esos precisos acordes en la acústica, como en los innumerables momentos en que su voz parecía absorber el aire para quedárselo. No existe un sonido similar al de su garganta, envuelto en una ternura descarnada, abierta; la de alguien que nunca sintió vergüenza de mostarse. La de un hombre que entró en mi vida (como en la de tantos otros) con una patada en el corazón.
La cercanía. Antonio es de la familia. Alguien sobre quien he hablado mucho. En especial con mi amigo Rafa (que es capaz de querer a una piedra) y que dio muchos tumbos y sufrió muchos escalofríos tras las canciones de este ser único.
La palabra {cómo expresar} {cómo evitar el tópico}. Es la hora de aprender. Hay que hablar de lo que se ama.
Recuerdo a las niñas cantando con él, un día tras otro, una tras otra.
Recuerdo a su primo Nacho diciéndome que la fortaleza de Antonio nos enterraría a todos.
Recuerdo tantos días.
Y siento amor, una sonrisa que sobrevuela las lágrimas.
Un brillo que me hace mejor.
Un deseo.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Antonio
Antiphon
I’ve gone through several nightmarish relationships in my life. As a result, my self esteem was damaged beyond remedy. The women I used to be attracted to vaccined me against any kind of complacency and self-absorption and made healthy vanity the fastest shortcut to shame.
Photography became the only acceptable excuse to demand approval and attention, the only source of comfort and relief, the emergency exit, the raw material of new beginnings after emotional downfalls and quakes. The spinal cord of my identity.
And suddenly, the biggest stroke of luck: her adventitious appearance, the unpredictable realization of all emotional needs. The struggle for survival mutated into another kind of primal drive: to give her something of great value in return. To let myself be noticed and succeed, putting this single virtue to a test. To clean up the mess left by past sentimental choices, working hard to earn her magnificent silences, giving the world something as precious as what I had been given.
I barely wheathered the storm until she reclaimed my name from obscurity. Maybe one must be completely emptied in order to be worthy of true grace.
I remember the first time touched her skin with my lenses, long before we really found each other, so even though times of economic recession are not the easiest for artists, I trust the means to find me like she did. Photography is not about distinction and celebrity, but love returning to the world like an antiphon. The privilege of channeling cardinal revelation through ordinary things.
Antiphon
I’ve gone through several nightmarish relationships in my life. As a result, my self esteem was damaged beyond remedy. The women I used to be attracted to vaccined me against any kind of complacency and self-absorption and made healthy vanity the fastest shortcut to shame.
Photography became the only acceptable excuse to demand approval and attention, the only source of comfort and relief, the emergency exit, the raw material of new beginnings after emotional downfalls and quakes. The spinal cord of my identity.
And suddenly, the biggest stroke of luck: her adventitious appearance, the unpredictable realization of all emotional needs. The struggle for survival mutated into another kind of primal drive: to give her something of great value in return. To let myself be noticed and succeed, putting this single virtue to a test. To clean up the mess left by past sentimental choices, working hard to earn her magnificent silences, giving the world something as precious as what I had been given.
I barely wheathered the storm until she reclaimed my name from obscurity. Maybe one must be completely emptied in order to be worthy of true grace.
I remember the first time touched her skin with my lenses, long before we really found each other, so even though times of economic recession are not the easiest for artists, I trust the means to find me like she did. Photography is not about distinction and celebrity, but love returning to the world like an antiphon. The privilege of channeling cardinal revelation through ordinary things.
Freeze-frame moment
The mod girl and the absent minded boy are your thoughts in their way back to you. They are also subproduct of a ritual, figments of memory, the anthropologic communion of our imagination.
This is not what you are seeing, so go scratch the print and find out the truth.
Whether this is art or not is your final responsibility. How much of it can you take?
If you can see beauty, it was somewhat impossible for me to express. Dare to cut through the flesh of my wide open eye, like Simone Mareuil’s. But test the razor on your thumb first, and bleed.
You are witnessing the collapse of reality. Do you have what it takes to stay and hold on to awareness? This is my offering: a human puja, a black and white ex-voto, a momentary state of conviction and fatefulness. A quivering surrender to your judgment.
Thersites
Luka gouged Nastia’s mauve eyes with a dented knife and put them into a ziploc, right after the body heavily hit the floor, just as Konstantin ordered -not only a proof of death, but also a fetish-, washing his blood stained hands pouring a bottle of mineral water over them and the blade.
He drove from Jávea to Alicante, entering the port harbor at half past five.
Konstantin was waiting his arrival at the deck of the yacht and held out his left hand without even looking at him.
‘Ladno’, he said, and threw the ziploc bag overboard.
No checking, no touching. Anything at all.
That night he got drunk as usual. He cried and babbled in Russian on the silicone breast of a Dominican prostitute, feeling like a ghost. Feeling weary and sold out.
Next day he found Nastia’s lover and hit his face until he spit half his teeth to the ground and the jaw was broken into three pieces.
Luka used to read Nietzsche before engaging the mob.
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster”. What a truth.
He also used to love Nastia from a distance.
Luka has always been a faithful servant. Utterly devoted. Silent. Stoic.
Now he is almost in his way back to the East. The train is leaving in about ten minutes.
Every man has a limit, even though it makes him a deserter, a runaway, a renegade, the next target shot.
He misses Mamulya a lot. She is like death itself. She always has some borscht to put on the table and a warm, quiet, forgiving embrace. Kak pazhivayesh, VazliublEnnyj Luka?
Every man has a a word, a heart, a limit and a mother waiting for him at home, somewhere.
Ya sebya nekhorosho chuvstvuyu, Mamulya.
Ya sebya nekhorosho chuvstvuyu.
Catenary
To Delia
I arrived before dawn, dead-tired from the 260 mile train trip and there she was: stunning beauty wrapped in messy sheets, offering arms and begging for cuddle.
Imagine Leonard Cohen in the darkest angle of the room, singing Suzanne, imagine me fed with tea and oranges, imagine the girl that said “Come in, I’ll give you shelter from the storm” in Bob Dylan’s song. Imagine both girls and better them, make their skin whiter and softer and give them a miraculous talent for quietude and imagine me lost in her body, feeling the whole scene somewhat unreal.
Take two extremes of this love in solemn silence, supported at its ends and acted on only by its own weight. Take us to the deepest realms of your mind and give us the joys of Sunday morning, the hush of night, the auspicious ways of the shipwrecked, the statuelike disposition of eternity and forget everything else.
We both had to get up and commute to work.
Mondays shouldn’t exist.
Agent of death
It was a case of posthumous revelation.
The man was standing by her side, holding the camera with his beautiful hands, waiting for an omen, waiting for the air to move the undergrowth and the leaves, waiting for a slight change in the light, waiting to hear his own voice whispering now, totally unaware of her proximity.
She touched his coat, and his hair, wondering how warmly and slowly those hands could travel across the delicate creases of her silken dress.
He ducked to the uneven and mossy ground, trying to put all the pieces of the gravestone together.
Confused, perplexed, she read her own name, slowly, voicelessly moving her pale and deaf lips.
The man took five photographs. Four of them were trashed. He only kept the one that rendered her whole life a mystery.
Stripping naked at the gates of Assisi
Photography is my primary coping behavior.
I take photographs of what I’m scared to own, lose or let go of.
I take photographs of what I fear or secretly wish to become.
I take photographs of cyclical nightmares.
I wordlessly beg for a proof of my deserving.
I hide behind the focus like a shy actor on stage.
Photography has also become my universal prayer, the multiple portrait of my flaws, the endless list of my unmet needs.
Photography makes me invisible so I can finally become visible in a figurative sense.
I get a grip on light so I can explain shadows.
Photography is for me the weird experience of being born, falling in love, falling out of love and then dying in one hundredth of a second.