A cataract is a waterfall, a large waterfall, and can also refer to the pathology that blurs vision. Between both meanings, the extensive exposition runs Apoteosis now de , which appeals both to the excess of images that characterizes today’s society and to the difficulty of deciphering them. The Alicante artist, winner of the National Prize in 2017 and president of the Magnum agency until last year, uses a close example, the final “earthquake” of the mascletan, to explain his intention by exhibiting without hierarchies or alignments, with different sizes, attached with a kind of thumbtacks to what could be a homemade cork, the 252 images that make up the unique exhibition that opens this Thursday at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM).
They are “orphan” images conceived by her in the last 20 years for various projects and commissions in numerous countries such as Mozambique, Spain, Korea or Brazil, the country where she is based. They are initial discards, organized only by color, to which new life is breathed in an exhibition of images that is also an installation lined with the cardboard of packaging and boxes. The curator, Iván de la Nuez, suggested that she stop “working telling stories”, without a narrative thread, and the artist, who started as a photojournalist in the local Alicante newspaper Information, she accepted the challenge, “tired of the story, everything is story, everything is narrative,” says De Middel. “I needed to stop and think and these images, which do not fit into the story, force you to stop and think,” he adds.
There are images of family Christmases, of motley bazaars, of lonely babies in the open, of threatening landfills, of a huge Amazonian tree that ridicules the size of a truck, of strings of sausages, of horses and cats, of unanswered maternal messages on the cell phone or of a veteran, tattooed fallera smoking a cigarette. It is an iconographic mass of impulse that is sometimes realistic, hyperrealistic, surrealist, and other times more documentary or conceptual. “I use fiction to understand reality”, 51 years old, who avoids catastrophism by referring to the omnipresent artificial intelligence.
“You have to look back in history. The photo has been condemned to death since it was born, with color film, with digital photography. In the end, there we are, we endure, although the change now is a much more important leap,” he maintains. And he proposes a distinction, based on the original meaning of the word: “Photography is writing with light. In the synthetic image, light does not intervene at all. We should call them synthetic images, not photographs. Nor have I seen anything that replaces what we could do.”
and curator of the exhibition, which concludes on October 12, writes in the catalog about the waterfall of images: “Cristina de Middel does not believe that, in terms of images, this coincidence can be attributed to polysemy. Above all, because the visual apotheosis of our time comes to cloud our vision in an irremediable way. Thus, waterfall and waterfall are exactly the same for this river photographer who navigates this paradox: the more images we produce, “We consume or share, the less we see. Like rudderless rowers who, dragged by the current, hunt for pixels.”
The director of the IVAM, Blanca de la Torre, recalled that the Valencian museum was a pioneer in Spain by “acquiring a fundamental and unique photographic collection” for its collection. And he highlighted the language of the Alicante creator, who made the “jump from photojournalism and documentaryism to conceptual or artistic photography, with her particular way of using fiction to deconstruct reality.”
