Los pasillos de las habitaciones

Estíbaliz

Gemma

El pan con el que ganan el pan

La cítara para los salmos

Una habitación con vistas al mar

Padova

There’s a feeling of hallucination when I take photographs in the context where photography is exposed and ‘officially’ recognized as a work of art.
The ever evolving, handy, portable and easily available media devices have made anyone with a camera an amateur photographer and anyone with a blog a writer or a journalist. Some of them are even entitled to be pros, and the air-built line between making photographs and just shooting randomly, compulsively photoshopping and immediately exposing them in the Internet, has been totally blown up. Forever, I’m afraid. We are saturated, engorged, overstuffed with casual, dispirited stuff. The Information Age Reality has become a percolating, pervasive monster that ejects, bursts forth, eructates, expels and pours out all kinds of aimless and redundant material.
That makes it much harder to strengthen and cherish a strong vocation, a strong artistic identity, and leap towards the bliss of it, just as Joseph Cambell wrote, in order to find true satisfaction and completion doing what we, the artistically driven, love. In a world where the ability to distinguish real art from casual crap is lost, all photographers and most writers are struggling, forced to work out of the realms of their passion, in demoralizing and creatively exhausting jobs to pay the rent and the bills.
That’s why, when I go to gallery exhibitions, and I take photos there, a strong, mixed and overwhelming feeling of anger, excitement, jealousy, impatience and awe, invades me, like sensing the future for a second, like feeling the nervous jitters of my first real solo vernissage, like hearing the voices of loved ones and friends, their congratulations, their warmth and happy presence, validating not only the part of beauty I owe to the world, the work well done, the burning drive to serve as a channel or an intermediary for some kind of much needed spiritual message to see deeper and beyond what appears to be, so they can feel free and whole just for that moment.
Then I awake to my senses and follow my arm and my hand where intuition is guiding them and something funny happens: I’m relieved from the burden, from the heavy luggage of those old unmet needs of unconditional love, approval, praise and recognition and I’m only appreciative of what surrounds me, and I know it’s all about not giving up the faith of life to spare the walls for my work to tell a story. If not now, tomorrow, but it has already happened.
I vowed to fulfill my loved one’s needs without betraying myself, because photography is the main vehicle of my love for them all. The only thing I can do for a living that actually makes me feel loving and alive. And galleries feel just like home.

A menudo renuevan sus lujosos vestuarios con nuevos y valiosos bordados, duermen a cubierto del frío y del sol y su piel de pintura, falsa y fría, se protege y se limpia como si fuera capaz de sufrir escalofríos o de poblarse de sudor.

Corren tiempos de falsedades (esto no es nuevo). Los viejos mecanismos para controlar las voluntades humanas se solapan con los nuevos hasta lograr que las viejas mentiras y las nuevas formen un todo indisoluble, hipócrita, autocomplaciente, monolítico.

Le llaman fe (cuando la fe es algo sagrado, en especial la que cada uno ha de tener en sí mismo) a una representación beata del vacío, a una lucha por la escala social, por un lugar en la función, por una lujosa mantilla.

Mientras, en este Estado laico que nos ha tocado sufrir, las televisiones alternan las imágenes de esculturas sangrantes de la Semana Santa con las de barrigas que se rellenan de cerveza en la playa más cercana. Si se diera el caso, porque este año también los fieles de la cofradía del chiringuito han visto frustrada su procesión a causa de la lluvia y el frío.

Mientras, en las altas esferas compiten por remodelar un gobierno que está más muerto que muchos de los pasos que han desfilado por las calles estos días y que, a diferencia de ellos, no resucitará en la madrugada del domingo. Ni en la del lunes. Ni en la del martes.

Ellos también han creado sus propios símbolos y su falsa fe.

Ajena a la realidad y al dolor de los vivos que, a diferencia de las estatuas, gritan y huelen mal.