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
Sin título – Chema Madoz
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958)
Title: Untitled
Year: 2007
Technique: black and white photograph on paper
Size: 130 x 165 cm
Edition: 4/7
Logic, ethics and poetry converge in the images of Chema Madoz, who uses photography with mastery, proposing a semantics of his own, full of metaphors and visual ironies. His compositions are the result of a thoughtful arrangement of the objects framed, with solutions in black and white that focus our attention on the scene. This piece, acquired by the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation at the 2009 Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo Arco (Madrid’s International Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO)) was part of, among others, the retrospective exhibition “Chema Madoz. Ars combinatoria” that toured several Spanish cities summarising the career of the artist awarded the National Photography Prize in 2000.
Madoz has always shown his inclination towards the symbolic, combining imaginative paradoxes and inviting the spectator to slow observation, to discover the hidden poetry in common objects that he submits, as here, to functional alterations. The pencils act as logs that create a bonfire, an intelligent allusion to the end of a process or, perhaps, to the loss of interest in literature in modern times. This collector of ideas reveals his passion for Dada, surrealist, minimalist and conceptual rhythms, but he achieves inevitably Madozian results, under impossible but palpable combinations, a tribute to everyday energy, a tribute that cares about the small things, letting them talk, reflecting on their primeval meaning. Here we have a real ascetic of the composition, a creator of scenes that, from his almost stoical point of view, resolves issues with an incomparable technical quality in black and white, without boasting or fussing, away from strange mediums and very far from any chromatic stridency, technological manipulation or striking format. Respecting, as an artist of his time, interdisciplinary hybridisations and the incorporation of photographic techniques into all fields of contemporary art, he shies away from elements capable of masking the essential value of each work. An authentic photographed symbolic power, where that mystery inherent in true art is maintained; photography without regrets, the baby of a unique artist who walks his own path through territories alien to the archetypes used. Respectful to the process, to the everyday object and to its own vitality.