Snapshots of the End of Times. Pablo Genoves.
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Contributing author: Dr. Jose Jimenez |
With a most interesting previous career in the field of photography, Pablo Genoves (Madrid, 1959) now shows in Madrid his work of recent years, which, as is his custom, is grouped into series, in this case under the names Precipitados, Cronologia del ruido and Antropoceno. These are 38 large-format photographic prints, dated between 2009 and 2014, almost all of them in black and white, except in two cases where other colors are used, and a video of 8’10” duration, titled Otro dia, otro lugar (2014), his first work in this medium, produced especially for this exhibition.
The show is excellent. The great quality of the works is reinforced by a magnificent installation, with dim lighting that helps the images seem to float in the vision and in the mind of the viewer, and also favored by the spaces of the old water deposit where it is presented, which by itself leads us to the memory of the industrial constructions that ceased to fulfill the functions for which they were designed. This last aspect dialogues with the theme of the pieces themselves.
Lancret (2014). 100 x 103 cm.
Genoves’s photographic prints are images constructed from already-made, found photographs, on which he intervenes with a collage procedure. They are digital superimpositions of diverse images, which implies a fully current photographic “language” that nevertheless goes back in time, since it seems that most of the original material comes from albums, postcards, photogravures and old catalogs dated between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. It also seems that this material was found in Berlin, an authentic “paradise” of antiques, and the city in which, besides Madrid, Genoves currently lives.
Images that result from that process of appropriation and mixing seem, precisely, to float in time. They are images that spring from reverie, from evocation and from memory, wrapped in the waves of turbulent waters, in waters in which fragmented ice slides, in clouds and nebulae, in dust, or in flames, which allows their flight in the course of time: backward and forward.
Barroco y exterior (2011). 145 x 160 cm.
With them, a kind of inventory of a civilization is fixed, in which in no case do human beings appear, nor any other type of forms or signs of life. The floating images are remains, residues, of the human spaces of knowledge and learning: libraries and books, museums and works of art, theaters… As well as of religion: churches and cathedrals; of power: palaces; or of industrial production: ruined and out-of-use mechanisms and machines. Residues all of them that still stand firm, in the image, amid solitude, desolation and abandonment.
The title of the show: El ruido y la furia, the usual Spanish translation of the title of William Faulkner‘s fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), the relentless account of a family tragedy in which there is no way out or possible redemption, gives us a key to the aesthetic intention of Pablo Genoves. His images speak to us no longer of family ruin, but of the destruction (self-destruction…?) of an entire civilization. Through flows of memory, the female voice that speaks in the video, in synthesis with the images that gradually appear, recounts a journey to the inevitable catastrophe, before or after it has occurred…? In the past or in the future…? For the voice tells us that the other person to whom she speaks would have defined time “as a metal plate, / elongated and ductile. / A plate that can be folded / and generate a reflection upon itself”. And if one dwells in it, in that plate, “several historical moments could take place at the same time.”
Cosmology (2013). 160 x 160 cm.
Through that synthesis and mixture, which truly impresses: superimposed images, chained words, Genoves constructs a kind of apocalypse, of revelation. And with it a new type of vanitas is articulated, a representation of the inevitable fleetingness of all things, no longer in the realm of the historical baroque, with its religious background, but on a plane that refers us to what we live today, the inevitable decline of a world that slides, with sound and fury: the greed for money, the hypnotism of hyperconsumerism as consolation, toward ruin and extinction. From there arises, ultimately, the contrast: in those negative images only the documents of culture remain standing, as records of the human beings’ search for and need of elevation.
Pablo Genoves: El ruido y la furia; curator: Alicia Murria; Sala Canal de Isabel II of the Community of Madrid, Madrid, from 17 December 2014 to 22 March 2015.
– Snapshots of the End of Times. Pablo Genoves. – – Home page: Alejandra de Argos –
