THE central office of the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid has curated a touring exhibition of work by 30 Spanish photographers, aimed at showing above all the diversity of the photographic practice around contemporary Spain. As such, the show is strong on contrasts in style, technique and subject matter, and even stronger on attitude.
While a couple of bullfighters (at least their behinds) are present here, and there is a sighting of that more recent cliche of Spanish image-making, the empty-eyed transsexual, much of the work has a distinctly international feel. This, is most pronounced with the artists who, it seems, just happen to use photographic materials and techniques in the creation of semi-abstract works.
Julio Alvarez-Yague uses a Man Rayish technique of bleachy marks, monochrome blemishes and collage on a large scale for his work, which eschews perspective in favour of creating a looser, more idiosyncratic pictorial space. Manel Esclusa's tissue-soft focus pieces create a surprisingly similar effect, dramatically freezing organic scenes into dynamic abstractions of blurs and eccentric points of focus.
In a similar vein, Atin Aya's photographs feature images, apparently captured at Spanish Catholic festivals, in which life-size replica crosses are carried in procession. Aya's method of homing in on the strange subject, however, is to remove as much of the human content as possible, leaving the potent religious symbol as a crucial component of his geometric monochrome compositions.
Of the more conventional image makers, Cristina Garcia-Rodero's precisely contorted images of fisherman, Koldo Chamorro's celebratory surreal genre scenes and Javier Campano's unconventional examination of the urban skyline all seem to explore familiar ground in ways that reinstill a sense of charged vitality into tired subjects.
Perhaps the most engaging work, at least from a technical point of view, is that of Madrid-based Santalla, a photographer whose rich black and white pictures, tucked into deep, wooden frames, involve an often corny, DIY mythology written with models, collage, toy dinosaurs and expressive marks made directly on the film.
What gives Santalla's work its edge, however, is the way in which he folds, crumples and crushes the printing paper in response to the image fixed on it, so that a toy-filled craggy grotto, begins to slip towards the three dimensional, so that the delicate skin of the photographic emulsion is transformed into something disconcertingly substantial.
