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

Collection

Sin título. Ventana Casa de piedra [Untitled. Stone House Window]

Image caption
MONTSERRAT SOTO

Sin título. Ventana Casa de piedra [Untitled. Stone House Window]

  • 2000
  • Chromogenic print affixed to Dibond (Diptych)
  • 220 x 150 cm
  • Cat. F_55
  • Acquired in 2012
By:
Isabel Tejeda

Even though they date from throughout the last 20 years, the pieces in this extensive set are linked thematically and conceptually, as they belong to one of the two lines of production that Catalan artist Montserrat Soto has developed in tandem. Soto moves to an alien landscape and travels to other places for these works. She does not include human beings in her images, as she considers that this focuses the photography on those human beings, thus detracting from the space. This is the why she puts all the emphasis of her framing on architecture, nature and objects, though nearly all her photographs are stripped of the anecdotal, especially those from the last 10 years.

Most but not all of these images are presented in monumental formats – see the three versions of Untitled. Desert Fence (2000), the diptych Untitled. Stone House Window (2000) and Untitled. Arches (2001)—, so that the layout that she has created for them generates the participation of the viewer: the works rest directly on the floor and create a type of mural trompe l’oeil, or mise-en-scène that takes the experience of the viewer to the limit between the fictitious and the contingent, a space that Montserrat Soto usually highlights by taking close-ups, as in a Baroque scenic strategy with barriers, windows and arcades.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Montserrat Soto
Barcelona 1961

Montserrat Soto studied at the Massana School in Barcelona and continued her training in France, specifically in Grenoble and Paris. Her first important exhibition was at Espai 13 at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona in 1994.

Her work, which basically shifts between photography, video and installation, is structured around two major themes: art spaces and landscape through travel. She builds her projects based on series, which follow some of those concerns. Soto has reflected on memory in art spaces, as in her major series Secret Landscape (2004), for which she photographed the houses of major art collectors so that curious viewers could view them through a gap.

Her landscape output comprises photos of natural areas and architecture. These are settings where human beings are omitted as subjects but can be tracked by the traces that they have left; places where the passing of time can be appreciated and there is an atmosphere of solitude that some authors have identified with interior landscapes. Her large format works are usually installed in the exhibition space, generating a trompe l’oeil through which the viewer moves; another space which cannot be accessed physically but which can be entered mentally and where they can imagine what is left outside the frame. In the words of Aurora García, “it is the viewer with their moving body and their internal configuration who becomes the real character in her works’.

Soto has staged solo shows at the Sala Montcada (Barcelona, 1996); the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturuneko (San Sebastián, 2004); the Telefónica Foundation (Madrid, 2004); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2005); el Centre d’Art La Panera (Lleida, 2006); the Patio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid, 2007); and the Santa Mónica Art Centre (Barcelona, 2007), among others.

Isabel Tejeda

 
«Landscapes and Other Things» (Valencia, 2000).
Vv.Aa. Paisajes y otras cosas, Valencia, Galería Luis Adelantado, 2000. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.