Gonzalo Puch began his career as a painter in his home town in Andalusia, but his work soon shifted towards sculpture and photography. He builds fragile scenarios out of mounting board, aseptic ‘incidents’ as he likes to call them, that figures inhabit temporarily until they are photographed. These sets of objects are mounted on – or are mixed with – belongings found in his home or the spaces where he taught. This is in keeping with one of the goals of contemporary art: blurring the limits between art and life. His white architectures, which follow on from the Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters, are however fleeting. These small worlds enclosed in rooms embody an idea that he never allows to be interpreted and are constructed to be inhabited only for as long as it takes to take the photograph; they epitomise the photographic concept of the snapshot and are obviously ‘real’, since, as José Lebrero Stals has pointed out, his work must be seen as a ‘fiction-document’. In fact, Puch’s work is hard to classify, as ultimately the result is a meeting of disciplines including theatre, performance, photography, video, etc., for which no adjectives exist. His is an oeuvre that seeks out new limits for a contemporary visual language that is paradoxically both ironic and cold.

Gonzalo Puch has exhibited his work at the Antonio Pérez Foundation (Cuenca, 2002); Salamanca University (1997); the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Creation (Seville, 2004); and the Madrid Botanical Garden as part of the PHotoEspaña Festival (Madrid, 2006).

Isabel Tejeda