Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Escalera esquina sombra [Shadow Corner Staircase]

Image caption
JAVIER VALLHONRAT

Escalera esquina sombra [Shadow Corner Staircase]

  • 1999
  • Silver gel print on wood and methacrylate
  • 35 x 48 cm
  • Edition 3/12
  • Cat. F_21
  • Acquired in 2004
By:
Isabel Tejeda

This series of seven photographs entitled Staircases is part of Intermediate Places by Javier Vallhonrat, produced in 1999 and exhibited at the L. A. Galerie (Frankfurt, Germany, 2000). It reflects the artist’s constant of using photography as a language with a defining ambivalence, as it offers a perpetual seesawing between polarised concepts such as object/image, copy/model and construction/reality. Vallhonrat built and photographed architectural models of isolated houses in a natural setting for this piece. He shows the resulting images along with the photographs of the models of the axonometric structures of the insides of the houses, generating a contrast between the image that shows a narrative atmosphere and the one that presents an analysis. These large photographs make us question what we are seeing; non-existent reality becomes credible in a discourse about the process to construct photography’s sense of reality and its ability to generate fictions.

The seven smaller photographs here show a very different scene within that project. We can see a negative image of staircase models taken from angles that provoke intense light contrasts. That key role of light and shadows further highlights the polarities of the concepts considered in the project. Thus, the staircases seem to suggest a link between what is apparently true and the truth. The blurring of boundaries between the staged and the real, between the copy and the model, is down to the implicit movement of the staircase, capable of connecting two separate dimensions. The way in which these photographs are exhibited on a single wall, one after another and with hardly any separation between them, suggests a series of photograms that highlight the dynamism, the transit between concepts, the flow of the staircase, the instability of photographs. ‘All those resources only refer to the instability and confusion around the very standing of photography with respect to the supposed reality to which it refers’, says the artist.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Javier Vallhonrat
Madrid 1953

Javier Vallhonrat studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid and also graduated in Psychology from Comillas University over twenty years later.

This internationally renowned fashion photographer started out by combining his advertising work with producing art projects. However, from the 1990s onwards, those projects would become his main focus, while he also embarked on a teaching career as a lecturer in Photography at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca. His artistic discourse is structured around an analysis of the narrative dimension of photography, of the pure image, of its objectual dimension and of the relation between constructed reality and photography.

After the Tributes (1983), Animal/Vegetable (1986) and The Possessed Space (1990) projects, in which his discourse was autobiographical in regard to sexuality and body identity, his output in the 1990s shifted away from himself and became more analytical. Between 1991 and 1996 he worked on Autograms (1991), Precarious Items (1993-1994) and Boxes (1995), where the only narrative is the photographic process converted into a theme and tool, in an attempt to ‘photograph the photography’. As part of that need to understand his work tools, a process of synthesis and order is produced which results in ‘empty’ boxes, objectified photographs with no images or, as Vallhonrat explained, ‘transparent images, related to an empty space converted into a physical object’. His output at that time made him a leading figure in Spanish contemporary art, proof of which is the National Photography Award that he received in 1995.

Vallhonrat has since worked on numerous projects where he makes increasing use of video and installation. His work shifts between concepts polarised by the artist: object/image, object/action, constructed image/real image, familiar/strange, order/chaos, copy/model, psychological space/physical space, construction/nature, uncertainty/predictability, etc. This seesawing between concepts, possibly thanks to the blurring of their concepts, generates a certain feeling of irresolution and fragility that the artist relates to the elusive aspect of the definition of photography.

His work has earned him awards including The Art Directors Club 76th Annual Awards (New York, 1997), PHotoEspaña Prize (Madrid, 2007), City of Madrid Photography Award (2009) and the Photography Award of the Community of Madrid (2009). His work has been exhibited at Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 1985); the Caja de Burgos Exhibition Centre (1993); the Hamiltons Gallery (London, 1992, 1995 and 1997); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1996); and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2006).

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.