Art has to battle time: it bears it, holds it up and flings it against itself. There is no way of looking at an art work without seeing in it the time when it was produced, a present time that seems to reappear when one looks at it again. This is not the same present time that shines out in films when we see dead actors and actresses alive again and long-gone places reappearing, unaware that they are fated to repeat the present in the first case and are prized for their documentary value in the second. The time that passes while we look at visual art is full of echoes. These include echoes of the period and of references to it; of the artists and their careers; echoes of those who look on and feel that there is always a loss of meaning, a need to interpret what is left unsaid.

These five photos taken by Eva Lootz in 1984 at the Torrevieja salt flats lay dormant until she produced this work in 2010. For us, here and now, they are proof that time exists and that it passes. 26 years later, the salt flats have regenerated at a rate of 600,000 tonnes per annum. These are the biggest salt flats in Europe. They are located in the south of the province of Alicante, between La Mata and Torrevieja, and have been worked since Roman times in the 1st century BC. Is it important to know this? What do the pictures say if they are shorn of data on location, output and climate? The photos focus on the processes of production, transportation and storage. White mountains stand 20 m high under the sun in temperatures that can reach 40ºC. The colour white, which is usually associated with cold, is inverted here to form a surface that reflects all possible light.

These photos have documentary allusions. There is no search for beauty unless beauty is understood in terms of information and visual records. They are harsh scenes; restrictive, bare reflections of an astonishing location where there is a pink lake: a lake pinker than the flamingoes that can sometimes be seen drinking from it when the water is not too salty. But their interest lies in their aesthetic constraints, in their great size as contemporary photography. Their uncertainty becomes a virtue. Lootz associates her experience of Spain as a host country with certain landscapes and materials, with the scents and forms of nature. In her exhibition 'La canción de la tierra' ['Song of the Earth'] at the Tabacalera Hall (2016), she explained how important her first visit to the Riotinto mines had been: 'it reaffirmed my suspicion that the earth's elements and their properties precede ideas as the orchestrators of human destinies, that is, it is the materials that 'make up the world' and prefigure the history of mankind, as the earth always comes first and humans second; we are a late species that needs to adapt and indeed does adapt to what it finds on earth'.

Eva Lootz's career can be seen as a process of adaptation to the natural environment via a tireless search for forms and materials; for flat images and living, audible, scented installations. Mountains of sand, earth and mineral ores are set up in exhibition spaces where their contents are isolated and interpretation shifts between the individual (but universal) ego and the outside world in which we live, which is a different universe. The stopping of time in these scenes alludes to repetitions in production, but also to another time: the time it takes for water to evaporate, leaving solid salt behind. That period of time affects the delay between the taking of the pictures and the production of the art work, a wait of 26 years. But it also affects the memory of those who see life passing by and decide to climb on board and live it.

Álvaro de los Ángeles