«5 fotógrafas en la Colección Banco Sabadell» (Alicante)
Banco Sabadell Auditorium. Alicante
The five photographs by Hannah Collins, Cristina de Middel, Isabel Muñoz, Montserrat Soto and Mayte Vieta are as much about ideas as they are about images: representations of objects or subjects perceived by the artists and retained in their minds.
Hannah Collins's vision of the city of Barcelona, a photograph from 2006 belonging to the series True Stories, is omniscient and contemplative, an instant of understanding the city from above its vicissitudes.
For her part, Cristina de Middel takes us to the beach at Ouidah, in Benin, a West African country where the divine presence of Èsû may be found, whose name is said to translate as "sphere", the representation of infinity in the Yoruba religion.
In Isabel Muñoz's work, the place is the body and, in this series (Mevlevi), the body engaged in a whirling ceremony of Turkish dance and meditation, a spiritual ascent towards truth and mystical ecstasy.
Guided by Jorge Luis Borges, Montserrat Soto transports us to Dante's hell: a hell immersed in a nebula of greens and blues, devoid of black, like the one that the blind Borges claimed he could still imagine. Familiar and remembered landscapes, repositories of every fear, a place of despair.
Finally, Mayte Vieta appears in awe of the sheer splendour of nature, in what seems to be a new version of The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich and of the sublime experience of landscape.
The city, nature, the body and hell. Different places, real or imagined, in which the power of things comes into play: mythical and religious reality, lived dreams, the supernatural and the mysterious, knowledge and the longing for wholeness. Diverse images, all traversed by an indecipherable sign that makes us feel part of the world and that we belong to it, even if only for a brief moment.
