CONCHA PÉREZ
LO QUE NOS QUEDA
Dates: September 23th – October, 31th, 2009
Opening: September 22th at 7h30 pm.
ADN Galería, c/Enric Granados 49, Barcelona
Concha Pérez (Madrid, 1969) develops her work in the context of post-produced digital photography, using this medium to carry out a deep investigation about architectonical articulation. Her reflection is constantly changing and declinating itself to express through her images feelings and sensations derived from the creative praxis. But not only because of the technical condidions of her work it is possible (and necessary) to state that Concha is an entirely contemporary artist, but also in a more conceptual way, she shows an absolute commitment to the present context. Although her work is not political in its most dialectical sense, it shows an unquestionable interest towards a sociological analysis of contemporary reality and the consequences of hegemonic gentrification. In a more formal way, her works do not develop a simple documental function, but the edition of the photography denotes a clear poetical purpose, not strictly aesthetical, which aims at dignifying the chosen spaces.
Concha introduces LO QUE NOS QUEDA through the laws of thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change state; the change of energy implies increment of chaos. This chaos generated by change, by transformation derived from the flux of life and especially by the action of human being, is made clear on her photographs. Uninhabited places, ruins of a past routine, of habitats and habits that today seem remote, hidden by the flowing of time.
Her photographs talk about the empty content of some spaces, but it is the emptyness itself that shows its content to us. They are not dead places. The change that makes this places look desert, obsolete, is the same change that express their kind of life. Her images do not represent an inanimate thing. The disuse, the desertion, not only refers to the transit and movement that one day took up those spaces, but also to the displacement of the activity to another place, so the energy only changes forms. It is the inertia of life that has been generating the place, and places that by use and by change we throw to chaos show up again, now through Concha’s look and under the form of a photographic image.
It is possible to consider that dissociation between content and contingent generates the strange and sinister. Life flows, its evolution, the everyday changes, unavoidably produces spaces to which what was bringing sense to them belong to the past. Concha’s photographs show the strangeness of life at present-time of the spaces forgotten by the flux of time.
What happen when an actual space is inhabited by the past? How does this space, where two different times coexist, show to us? Probably ghostly, generating inevitably an excess of sense, printing in the imagination of the spectator an image of what it was sometime, continously appearing, in an involuntery way and impossible to control by the spectrum of reality that one day in habited the space, giving sense to it.
Is a school still a school even though its totally unused? What are the microphones of unexistent lecturers talking about? Why are the tables so ordered if there is nobody to feed? It seems that some of the elements introduced in the photograph by the artist herself are talking about those spectrums, about the strangeness of an empty place, abandoned. This effect is made clear by the difficulty to distinguish what is real and what has been manipulated.
It is a dialectical game between essence and appereance. The tension between what is, what was and what it seems to be, solves finally in the conclusion that things happen because we make them happen. What we get from those spaces, which are being and also were, is the question that Concha is presenting now, closed by a high technical hability and a notorial sense of framing, an absolute control of the space perception.
