Calendar

THE WAITING GAME III - Txema Salvans
NOVEMBER 3 - MARCH 5, 2023

Name: THE WAITING GAME III - Txema Salvans NOVEMBER 3 - MARCH 5, 2023
Start: 2023-01-11T20:00
End: 2023-01-11T21:00
Location: {

OPENING NOVEMBER 3 - 8:00 PM following the artist's masterclass
NOVEMBER 3 - MARCH 5, 2023
Torre Room
Header image: Untitled, by Txema Salvans

Txema Salvans presentsThe Waiting Game III, the result of his participation in the museum's Tender Puentes curatorial project. The work is also part of his series of projects in which the artist uses to talk about an activity as universal as "waiting," in this case, that of a dog.

The presence of dogs in photography usually responds to three basic reasons: the dog fulfilling an instrumental function, as the subject being photographed, or as a mere environmental element (accidental or not). In addition, there are other reasons derived from the above: the dog as a paradigm of loyalty, a living stuffed animal, or an endearing, funny, or fierce being in its relationship with other animals or with people.

My project focuses on a function that has been much less exploited by photography to date. I address an image that is engraved in our visual memory and yet rarely represented in photography: that of the dog guarding the property in the absence of its owners. It is a dog, usually chained, that spends its days behind a gate, a wall, or a metal fence guarding an industrial warehouse, a farmhouse, a scrapyard, or a luxury villa," says Salvans.

In line with the artist's current working method, the work uses large format and a tripod as technical resources that allow for a leisurely, photographic pace. Accuracy, rigorous description, sobriety in composition, and the selection of a distance to the framing allow for millimeter-precise control over the selection of the viewpoint.

His work plan outlines an intense journey through the Mediterranean peninsula. A luminous territory under the blinding light and mineral brilliance of the sun. A densely populated space, full of people and life. A territory that presents a unique culture, full of paradoxes that set it apart from any other place and allow the artist to take a position that is not only physical, but intellectual. Through his work, he reflects on the recurrence of a landscape with a figure (animal) that, despite changes in the landscape and technology, with advances in video surveillance and security, transcends history and remains there, as always.

In The waiting game, the initial project in the series, which won the 2012 RM Photobook Competition, Salvans portrayed prostitution on the road. In The waiting game II, the continuationof the work, the protagonists were fishermen from irrigation channels, reservoirs, and ports in the Mediterranean area.

In each series, the waits share a type of space. Txema Salvans emphasizes this by publishing identical books in which the only thing that varies is the word "Waiting."

BIOGRAPHY

Txema Salvans (1971) is a documentary photographer who alternated between studying biology and photography. He studied at the ICP in New York thanks to a scholarship, from where he moved on to La Fábrica, Benetton's artistic creation center. First prize winnerof FotoPresin 1997, he won thePhotoEspañacompetition for the best Spanish photography book in 2005 and the RM Publishing House's Ibero-American Book competition in 2013 with his work The Waiting Game.

The essence of his work lies in exploring the wide and varied palette of human behaviors and desires that often surprise us. In recent years, Salvans has used his large-format camera to seek out scenes of leisure in the post-industrial society of the Mediterranean coast, emphasizing their surreal banality and heightening the feeling of amusing strangeness they produce in us.

His work speaks to us of a collective self-deception that leads us to fantasize about temporary pockets of paradise, but it also speaks to us of a paradox: we, the viewers of the photographs, are prevented from seeing what the actors—in the photographs—want to see, and instead, we are forced to look at what they do not want to see. Salvans has collaborated with magazines around the world.

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