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

Collection

Sin título [Untitled]

Image caption
CHEMA MADOZ

Sin título [Untitled]

  • 2011
  • Silver gel print on paper
  • 73 x 83 cm
  • Cat. F_155
  • Acquired in 2013
By:
Isabel Tejeda

Chema Madoz frequently uses books in his photographic works. In constructing his visual poems, he takes them to the point of illegibility. In one image he sets up a mirror that blends in as if it were one of the pages (at first glance the object seems unchanged, but on closer examination this proves not to be the case); in another he turns a book into an object of desire and curiosity by placing a peep-hole on its cover; he turns another book into a smaller clone, as if one had been born from the other. There are photos in which he warns of the alleged dangers of reading by placing a razor blade between the pages of a book. Finally, he turns a bar serviette dispenser into a dispenser of book pages to occasional readers after their beer on a Saturday. In all these cases, books are the nouns of his work and the objects that accompany them are the adjectives, which he also ends up activating.

The black and white photo in the Banco de España Collection, known simply as Untitled (2011), shows four stubborn books standing in an almost military fashion as they prepare to undergo inspection, against a spotless white background that decontextualises them. In each one a letter has been cut out to spell the word 'book'. This is paradoxical, given that the four books are part of a collection of the complete works of Mexican author Carlos Fuentes in Spanish, including novels such as Cambio de piel [A Change of Skin] and El mal del tiempo [Restlessness].

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Carlos Martín
Chema Madoz
Madrid 1958

Having studied both art history and photography, in the early 1990s Chema Madoz began to create work based on a poetics of the object with genealogical roots in surrealism — for example, Méret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup — and in visual poetry, with allusions to the Catalan Joan Brossa. The leap that his paradoxical objects make from these forerunners is they are created exclusively to be photographed. These everyday objects are never manipulated but rather decontextualized and foregrounded, as though they were portrait subjects. One of the artist’s visual strategies is always to photograph in black and white to highlight that the image happens in another space, that of the mind. He also combines seemingly incompatible objects, whose union appears to be surprisingly natural, through metaphors and metonymies (a storm drain grate that becomes a dish rack; a feather whose fall breaks a glass shelf; a wine glass that is a woman’s pubis; a musical note representing the sound emerging from a throat, etc.). These impossible encounters between recognizable objects, assembled like collages, take on new meanings: sometimes problems of logic, sometimes of paradoxes, through which we must decode the meaning and use of each object in an unexpected twist that usually leads to an amusing “Eureka!” moment.

Madoz has featured in solo exhibitions at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, Spain, 1988); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain, 1999); the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1999); the Fundación Telefónica (Madrid, Spain, 2006); the Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2011); the Fundació Miró (Barcelona, Spain, 2013); and the Sala Alcalá 31 (Madrid, Spain, 2015). He has won the Kodak Award (1990) and the Premio Nacional de Fotografía of Spain (2000).

Carlos Martín

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