Next Saturday, 17 December, the Fundación de Arte Ibáñez Cosentino and the Centro Pérez Siquier in Olula del Río kick off the new exhibition programme DIÁLOGOS with the exhibition MARE NOSTRUM by photographer Txema Salvans (Barcelona, 1970). An initiative curated by Sema D’Acosta that aims to link the figure and legacy of Carlos Pérez Siquier with the best of present and future Spanish photography.
For this first cycle of exhibitions, which will run from December 2022 to the beginning of 2024, the curator has selected four renowned artists such as Txema Salvans (Barcelona, 1971), María Moldes (Pontevedra, 1974), Mar Sáez (Murcia, 1983) and Ricardo Cases (Orihuela, 1971), all of them related to or born in the Levante area and connected to the Mediterranean Sea.
In a way, the projects chosen are close to the spirit, landscape and light of Almería, the fundamental axis of Carlos Pérez Siquier’s life and work. In fact, his career could be understood as a visual chronicle, extremely honest, of southern Spain; a story about the gaze that tells us about people and places from commitment and a humble, unpretentious truth. Implicitly, his series are a tribute to the people and places of his native province. Carlos Pérez Siquier’s characteristic style is inseparable from the place where he has lived and developed his career.
The main aim of the DIÁLOGOS programme is to build bridges between the Pérez Siquier Centre and mid-career Spanish photographers, underlining the fundamental importance of the language of a pioneer like Pérez Siquier among the most recent generations.
MARE NOSTRUM. TXEMA SALVANS
From next Saturday, 17 December, Txema Salvans presents in the exhibition rooms of the City of Culture of Olula del Río a selection of photographs from his series Perfect Day, an exhaustive journey along the Mediterranean coast, from Girona to the coast of Cadiz, developed over more than fifteen years, from 2005 to 2020.
His images reflect in a leisurely manner on the use and habits in relation to leisure time in contemporary societies, silently portraying those moments of apparent relaxation that allow us to disconnect from work routines in a familiar and relaxed atmosphere. Specifically, his visual analysis focuses on situations and places near the beach, out-of-the-way places that escape the usual tourist postcard and where the sea barely appears, if at all. His ironic gaze serves here to question in a scathing way certain daily practices of a part of the population which, far from the great cathedrals of urban leisure such as shopping centres and theme parks, spends its leisure time immersed in its own bubble of fictitious happiness. Like an obsessive anthropologist, Salvans investigates our social behaviour and reviews some of the surprising corners, most of them residual, where we spend our free time.
