Notebooks

This series was made between 2009 and 2013. It is a fundamental part of my photographic proposal. It is difficult to establish how and, specially, when an idea starts to be seen in real, specific results that reflect it faithfully.

Many of the contents of the series were already part of my everyday life, they were a sort of “custom of the reason” and it was not easy to see them and above all consider them as necessary when physical pieces were produced. But, as I said, they were too mine, by constantly seeing them I finished appropriating them considering them as indispensables. Even some of these photographs that were produced by random. It has not been necessary to link the inherited contents with those that are mine because in some way they are the same.

The work developed without any rush, with no need to become a sample of my own proposal; it was more a game than a proposal, more a trial than a demonstration. With this lack of purpose during years these pieces built a cluster that I named “Notebooks”.

As in a notebook where everyday things are written down, as in a surface where thoughts and experiences can be multiplied these ideas were consolidated and turned into objects. Basically they consist of relating a bottom with a surface, a receiving image with a portrait or a fragment of a portrait, of my own or somebody else's.

Given that the memory is fragmentary, I wanted (I don't know if consciously) that the final piece was completed by the observer, that not everything had been be said, not even hinted. Perhaps the personal ideas in the act of looking are able to give a meaning to that memory. It is not as if I would like to narrate something in each notebook, rather as if each notebook would like to propose a game between present and past, between its light and its gloominess. This past and this present debate in a constant game seducing each other letting us to give a specific meaning. So, I used transparency to allow this blending, to dress each piece with an identity in two well differentiated parts . I think that during the developing of the series it has been possible to go into a personal reflexion and see how constantly expressive possibilities open from a seed germination.

The nature of the notebooks, the emphasis on concepts such as fleetingness, absence or perishable made me browse into photography files giving them the opportunity to belong to a new intention, a renaissance that has to do more with its particular mood than to mine.

Barcelona, May 2015