Communication with the purpose of culturally promoting artists included in the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Collection, works protected by intellectual property rights. Their total or partial reproduction or processing by any means, or their transmission or cession in any form is forbidden without the authorisation of the holder of the rights to the works

Acqua Gasosa I

TECHNICAL DATA

Author: Dionisio González (Gijón, Asturias, 1965)
Title: Acqua Gasosa I
Year: 2007
Technique: siliconised photograph on methacrylate
Size: 60 x 300 cm
Edition: 5/7

The work, acquired by the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation at Madrid’s International Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO) in 2009, belongs to the well-known photographic series that the Asturian artist worked on from 2003 in different Brazilian cities, using images of the .favelas (slum areas) that contrast the poverty of these humble constructions with the structures digitally incorporated through the post-photographic process and inspired by contemporary architecture. Without adopting excessively militant postures, the artist positions himself politically and critically, shaping those impossible spaces that flourish in his work, those non-places that lack the authentic configuration of spaces, being circumstantial, defined by our own passage, with no apparent identity, because it is not easy to internalise their content.

In the works of Dionisio González, we find a subtle harmony between architecture, photography and the design of structures that is often complimented by video representations. With the new digital technologies applied to the image, the artist reinvents suburban situations and landscapes, wrapped in a certain baroque style, overloaded images where objects and subjects pile up giving feelings of suffocation or exclusion of a world that does not allow itself to be dominated. The photograph is composed of shots of different buildings, retouched depending on the environmental circumstances recorded at different times of the day. They are sharp images, with a degree of technical mastery, that tend towards the horizontal and try to avoid the excessive symmetry of the whole.  In this sort of analysis of the slum we find more things hidden that first appears; niches and hollows, the horror vacui of the composition, a tragic feeling and also an illusion, a faith in the future, encouraging constructions to be inhabited in another way, between accusing pessimism and a message of hope for globalisation.