50.8 x 60.96 cm
Spanish photographer Chema Madoz, whose minimal and surreal black and white photographs have been exhibited extensively worldwide,will be exhibitedin Boston for the first time with a solo show at the Robert Klein Gallery.The exhibition, Sin Titulo, will open with a reception on Saturday, May 10, from 2 to 5 PM and run through June 21, 2014.
A noose made of pearls.A cloud in a birdcage. Madoz’s images are fanciful, poetic, humorous and contemplative. As both object-creator and image-maker, Madoz is doubly involved in the final product; he is as much behind the lens as he is in front of it. Even so, his presence is hardly felt. Beautifully printed and toned gelatin silver prints, these photographs do not present as overly constructed or clever. Instead, in the Surrealist tradition of Man Ray, Dora Maar, Brassaï, and Salvador Dalí, they prompt us to look beyond what we see.
Toying with the concept of photography and its “special status with regard to the real,” as Rosalind Krauss writes in the 1985 exhibition catalog for L’amour fou: Photography & Surrealism, Madoz imagines illusory relationships between real objects. Inpresenting the unexpected, he asks the viewer to make a mental leap and celebrates the cognitive dissonance that comes about as a result.
Madoz’s curiosity with objects started at a very young age. In an interview with José María Parreño, published in Chema Madoz: 2000-2005, Madoz recalls a watershed moment in elementary school:
I arrived late on the first day of class. All the other children were already seated around a large table in thekitchen and there was no space for me. The teacher said, Don’t worry, we’ll prepare a place right away,and she opened the door of the oven so that I could use it as a desk. I sat down on my stool with mynotebook lying on the open door and looked intothe black interior of the oven.
Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1958, Chema Madoz studied art history at the Centrode Enseñanza de la Imagen. His work has been shown throughout Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States and is in museum collections worldwide. Madoz will have an exhibition in France at Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie 2014 later this year.
The Sin Titulo reception on Saturday, May 10, will be held from 2 to 5 PM and take place jointly with Martha Richardson Gallery, whose showJohn Wilson: small drawings will also be opening. The event is free and open to the public; light refreshments will be served
