Pablo Genovés, (Madrid, 1959) has imposed his own personal and different stamp on contemporary Spanish photography. His work can be read as an enquiry into the signs of memory, symbols of a collective and recent past which the artist extrapolates and transforms into a continuous process of re-signification. His images shape introspective territories, frontiers between the evocation and the dream, in which the artistic medium itself forms an essential part of the discourse: the combination of photographic-digital techniques and pictorial elements endows his work with a character that is unknown and difficult to classify. In this crossroads of languages, Genovés proposes a new relationship with the viewer in which the unusual and the unexpected play a defining role.

In the series Extravíos (Astray) (1995-99), this fusion of reproduction techniques generates mixed and uncertain textures, proposed to the viewer as confused tracks in time. The artist formulates an iconography of the old happiness, largely created by the faces of the American cinema from the ‘30s and ‘40s. In Sucedáneos (Substitutes) (1999-2003) the images of cakes, jewels or a woman’s hands are shown as objects of desire and temptation which at the same time are impossible to be possessed. The images of Viaje interior (Inner journey) (2004-2008) present digitally created forms of life, unusual beings with echoes of science-fiction and which interfere in landscapes of the past, generating a dialogue between times.

In Precipitados (Precipitates) (2008-2009), the series that we now present, emblematic spaces of our culture come into contact with natural elements (water, ice, sand). The reflection on the perennial nature of memories at the same time provides a new reading on the documentary role of the photographic image. Culture conquered by nature, or nature imprisoned by culture? Precipitados proposes a farewell journey to all that which was once an emblem of our achievements. The physical destruction of these spaces is none other than the materialisation of an earlier destruction – current and ours – whose signs are as teasing and ambiguous as the veracity of an old print. In these images from Pablo Genovés, the struggle between the two has been eternal, and it is no longer possible to discern who is attacking whom. The fight for the appropriation of space leads to scenes of destruction, of the end of an epoch, with a nod in the direction of the catastrophist forebodings which today, more than ever, sharpen the collective imagery. These images in turn come from pre-existing realities: old prints which the artist rescues and transfigures, releasing the photographic image from its eternal validity, endowing the elements of the past with a new capacity for evocation.

Pablo Genovés’s work has been exhibited throughout Spain as well as being shown (individually and collectively) in France, Germany, England, Argentina and the USA. His photographs form part of public and private collections, both Spanish and international.