Artist
Antonio Guerra
Antonio Guerra (b. 1983, Spain). His practice shows an interdisciplinary approach to the photography medium that reflects on systems of construction in the contemporary landscape, the processes of their transformation, and our own perception of them through images.
Guerra’s work has been exhibited individually in institutions and art centres such as The Domus Artium 2002 (DA2) in Salamanca, Centro Niemeyer in Asturias, Sala Amárica in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the PHotoEspaña festival in Madrid, Centro Leonés de Arte (CLA) in León, and several art galleries. He has also exhibited in the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM) in Ancona, Italy and Thessaloniki, Greece; Talent Latent in Tarragona; Encontros da Imagem in Braga, Portugal; BredaPhoto International Photo Festival, Holland; the Embassy of Spain in Havana, Cuba; and Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. For his work, he has received a MUSAC Artistic Creation Grant, a Pilar Juncosa & Sotheby’s Award from the Miró Mallorca Foundation, a Villalar Foundation grant, a Community of Madrid Visual Art Grant, a VEGAP Grant for Visual Creation, and the Roberto Villagraz grant from EFTI. He has been artist in residence at the Casa de Velázquez Académie de France in Madrid and his work is included in public and private collections.
Ninguna Ruta Marcada (No Marked Path)
With access to new communication technologies, our way of understanding ‘the trip’ has changed. The road, as a journey of discovery and exploration, has made way for the creation of artificial and interactive situations based on the simulacrum.
No Marked Path reflects, through the imagery of the popular culture ‘road movie’, on the present conflict between highway travel, technology and image. Starting from the idea that Frederic Jameson points out of ‘our inability to achieve aesthetic representations of our own current experience’, I’m interested in examining how concepts related to the mark left by man through technology, the screen as a catalyst for experiences, and the interrelation between map and territory are present in our environment and landscape.
Composed of six chapters that include photography, photosculpture, and installation, the work combines materials and media, fiction and reality, strategically displaying visual and material details to confront the device with the image for its questioning.
No Marked Path includes: Borgesian Map (6 expanded images), Territories (48 photographs), Conquests (6 photographs), Horizons (10 photographs), The Myth (3 photographs) and Travels (1 sculpture).
The artists selected by PHotoESPAÑA in this edition are: Marius Scarlat (Romania, 1993), Antonio Guerra (Zamora, 1983), Suwon Lee (Caracas, 1977), Carlos Alba (Madrid, 1984) and Arguiñe Escandón (Bilbao, 1979). The possibility of seeing their work together offers us a contemporary vision of photography in Spain, in which proposals that are more documentary in nature are displayed side by side with works that are more conceptual, with the use of photography that intersects with installation. In the midst of the digital age, the pandemic has intensified the need to think about our immediate environment and our social relationships.
In this context, the work of the authors selected offers us a space for reflection and confrontation about issues relating to globalisation, technology and the environment. Marius Ionus Scarlat works on issues of Romanian identity from a personal perspective marked by his family’s migration to Spain. Suwon Lee also does it from a gender perspective and through her own body in light-based performative actions. Antonio Guerra investigates the construction of contemporary landscape its transformation processes and our perception of it through image, in a work that merges photography and sculpture.
Technology is also present in the artworks of Carlos Alba who addresses issues relating to everyday life in a world in continuous transformation. The specific project he presents is on light pollution in large contemporary cities. Contemporary nightscapes of great beauty that hide devastating effects on the population and the environment. Finally, night light is also the object of study along with sound in the project presented by Arguiñe Escandón, through which she has investigated the
paranormal effects occurring in an area of the Spanish Mediterranean produced by a magnetism that alters the life of the inhabitants, the fauna and the flora.
The five authors are at a crucial moment in their careers. In the past year, their work has been critically acclaimed and they boast international experience they can expand thanks to the Futures platform.