Contemporary photography has found a way of simulating the world accurately in enlargements and new ways of showing and mounting images. Borges’ short story about drawing up a map so accurate that it would be at a scale of 1:1 has given way to the possibility of showing everything that surrounds us in real size, albeit in a fragmented fashion, using photo printing techniques. But there is nothing less real than an image of itself. Images will always be spaces for thought and analysis, at a more or less premeditated distance from the object that they depict. To a certain extent, what makes an image real is its surface, as indicated by Godard in Histoire(s) du cinema and cited by Didi-Huberman in Images in Spite of All: 'even scratched to death a simple thirty-five-millimetre rectangle redeems the honour of all of the real'.

Miguel Ángel Tornero's diptych Untitled is part of a series jointly known as The Night in Vain. To do something in vain is to do it unnecessarily. But in these photos there is an outstanding insistence on doing things that involve effort —useless, perhaps, but not without its connotations— and on doing them slowly. The work comprises pictures in which roadside plants such as thistles and aloes that grow in the margins between fields and roads and lanes are brought to the fore. This symbol of the marginal features out-of-focus, overexposed flash photography where there is no calibration between the brightness of the light and the distance from the objects photographed. And to make things even more complicated, the pictures are taken at night.

The darkness of the night is a black hole that swallows up everything that seems important or meaningful in sunlight. It does away with the pressure of limits and diffuses contours. Thus, the light from the camera flash restores some prominence to the objects that it illuminates, pulling them out of the blackness and giving them form, albeit in a flat, limited fashion, and a (questioned) importance. Iván de la Torre has the following to say about Tornero's use of artificial light: 'it is used especially to signpost points of special interest. It is thus paradoxical that for spectators the burst of light from the flash[…] serves to light up the characterless trunk of a tree, the backs of unknown individuals, the corner of a building, the edge of a path in the dark of the night. Where, then is the supposed interest?'.

These aspects seem to indicate that the interest may lie precisely in giving prominence to secondary, marginal elements; in bringing into the foreground things destined to live on the margins: less attractive flowers, rougher grass, more thrilling personalities. Similarly, the artist trims his images and superimposes them on a cardboard backing. This not only recalls the collages that he undoubtedly seeks to reference, but also, we believe, gives a theatrical feel. The work comprises layers of superimposed photographic images, which give it the volume of a relief map: indications, drawing and symbols. If photography indicates, then the superimposition of several layers symbolises. If images relate, then the theatrical look of the composition represents.

The frames that delimit, contain and protect the compositions in this series are hand-painted. This detail brings us back to the artist's attempt to value the manual component, with its imperfect, emotional nature. In Tornero's earliest photo compositions he did this digitally. But there came a point when he decided to go back to direct, hands-on work, using digitally printed images which are then cut out by hand, revealing the white interior of the paper and a hesitant approach to broken, non-profiled forms. His use of flash photography not only gives greater prominence to the unusual and the unnoticed but also brings out their contours and bleaches and burns colours and shapes. He seems to be telling us that this hitherto unheard-of prominence of marginal objects comes at the expense of a loss of colour, form, function and precise location.

The exhibitions where these and other similar works from the same series have been shown have featured a theatrical mise-en-scène. Sometimes metal structures have been used as easels on which the collages are placed like hoardings advertising the unexpected or ungrounded, as inevitable themes or icons. This was done, albeit tentatively, in Camino a Cortijo Maravillas ['The Road to the Maravillas Estate'] at the Iniciarte Gallery in Cordoba (2011) and years later in La noche en balde [The Night In Vain'] at the Juan Silió Gallery (2017). The Unschooled Earth featured in the collective exhibition Querer parecer noche ['Wanting to Seem Like the Night'] at the CA2M in 2019. That same year the exhibition Sin atajos ['No Short Cuts'] at the University of Jaén featured this diptych Untitled alongside others under the name Rare Blooms.

The link between Tornero's work and his home region has the emotional prominence that comes with heartfelt experiences and a hard-worked visual education that emphasises the essential over what is merely thought to be important.

Álvaro de los Ángeles