Having studied both art history and photography, in the early 1990s Chema Madoz began to create work based on a poetics of the object with genealogical roots in surrealism — for example, Méret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup — and in visual poetry, with allusions to the Catalan Joan Brossa. The leap that his paradoxical objects make from these forerunners is they are created exclusively to be photographed. These everyday objects are never manipulated but rather decontextualized and foregrounded, as though they were portrait subjects. One of the artist’s visual strategies is always to photograph in black and white to highlight that the image happens in another space, that of the mind. He also combines seemingly incompatible objects, whose union appears to be surprisingly natural, through metaphors and metonymies (a storm drain grate that becomes a dish rack; a feather whose fall breaks a glass shelf; a wine glass that is a woman’s pubis; a musical note representing the sound emerging from a throat, etc.). These impossible encounters between recognizable objects, assembled like collages, take on new meanings: sometimes problems of logic, sometimes of paradoxes, through which we must decode the meaning and use of each object in an unexpected twist that usually leads to an amusing “Eureka!” moment.
Madoz has featured in solo exhibitions at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, Spain, 1988); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain, 1999); the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1999); the Fundación Telefónica (Madrid, Spain, 2006); the Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2011); the Fundació Miró (Barcelona, Spain, 2013); and the Sala Alcalá 31 (Madrid, Spain, 2015). He has won the Kodak Award (1990) and the Premio Nacional de Fotografía of Spain (2000).
Having studied both art history and photography, in the early 1990s Chema Madoz began to create work based on a poetics of the object with genealogical roots in surrealism — for example, Méret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup — and in visual poetry, with allusions to the Catalan Joan Brossa. The leap that his paradoxical objects make from these forerunners is they are created exclusively to be photographed. These everyday objects are never manipulated but rather decontextualized and foregrounded, as though they were portrait subjects. One of the artist’s visual strategies is always to photograph in black and white to highlight that the image happens in another space, that of the mind. He also combines seemingly incompatible objects, whose union appears to be surprisingly natural, through metaphors and metonymies (a storm drain grate that becomes a dish rack; a feather whose fall breaks a glass shelf; a wine glass that is a woman’s pubis; a musical note representing the sound emerging from a throat, etc.). These impossible encounters between recognizable objects, assembled like collages, take on new meanings: sometimes problems of logic, sometimes of paradoxes, through which we must decode the meaning and use of each object in an unexpected twist that usually leads to an amusing “Eureka!” moment.
Madoz has featured in solo exhibitions at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, Spain, 1988); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain, 1999); the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1999); the Fundación Telefónica (Madrid, Spain, 2006); the Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2011); the Fundació Miró (Barcelona, Spain, 2013); and the Sala Alcalá 31 (Madrid, Spain, 2015). He has won the Kodak Award (1990) and the Premio Nacional de Fotografía of Spain (2000).