“Party”. Cristina de Middel at La New Gallery.
After her striking work in “The Afronauts”, Cristina Middel (Alicante, 1975) surprises us at La New Gallery with her latest project PARTY, a combination of manipulated texts from the Little Red Book: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung and the images taken by the artist during her travels in China. With them, this photojournalist based in London, who boasts one of the most solid careers on the international photography scene, offers us a personal approach to contemporary Chinese society and its tension between capitalist Westernization and the communist regime.
Cristina de Middel here censors parts of the text that have become obsolete in present-day Chinese society and, by highlighting others, gives rise to emphatic phrases that she pairs with photographs that come very close to the documentary and that, at times, also suggest to us a vision of high poetic content.
“Photography has become very widespread; we have grown desensitized toward certain subjects from being told about them so often in the same way and, in the search for new forms of expressing the same thing, reportage is increasingly giving way to aesthetic value. The result is an invasion of beautiful images documenting terrible tragedies, and so the debate is set, and that line you speak of is officially blurred. In my opinion, in order to recover it, the line separating the documentary from the artistic should not be marked by aesthetics but by the intention of the work” says the artist.
Cristina de Middel. Party. La New Gallery. Carranza, 6. Madrid. Until 19 July.
– “Party”. Cristina de Middel at La New Gallery. – – Alejandra de Argos –
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