Opening reception: Friday, February, 5, from 8 pm

Exhibition: February, 6 – March, 27, 2010

Opening Hours: From Tuesday to Saturday, 4:30 – 8:30 pm

KOWASA gallery presents from February 5 to March, 27, "Some day, let's leave" ("Un día partimos"), a monographic exhibition dedicated to Carlos Barrantes. The show gathers together photographs from the series "Movement" (1999), "Beyond the Horizon" (2002), "Surprise" (2004), and concludes with Barrantes’ most recent project, an artist book under the title "Some day, let's leave" (2009), which lends its title to this show and contains 13 original prints made with the digital pigment process Digigraphie/Giclée.

For Carlos Barrantes photography is a medium which allows him to transform reality. Rather visceral than thoughtful, his images transmit sensations that deal with capturing the aura of a world in movement. Inextricably related with nature and its elements –the human body being one of them – they emerge as congruent visual statements of a dreamful journey to the uncertain terrain of a magic reality, capable of revealing its full magnitude only before the camera. Placed at ground level, the photographic lens provides us with a singular version of the ups and downs of the universe. The boundaries between the illusory and the real drop, and bring us from the instantaneity to the infinity of matter. Carlos Barrantes’s series share a meticulous technical treatment. From the years in his non-industrial studio in Mallorca (1993-2007), until our days and his new studio in Saint-Estève (a little town next to Pepignan, France), Barrantes has developed an interesting labour of investigation in antique and contemporary alternative photo-chemical processes. Analogue or digital, his prints stand out for their texture and quality, as singular alchemical propositions.

"Movement" is a series of 24 images that proposes a parallelism between the movement of nature (the sun, the rain and the waves) and the dance of the bodies. Barrantes plays with the contrasts of light, slows down movement, captures it, and transforms it into the main protagonist of his compositions. Through prolonged exposures and the use of Cyanotype –a 19th century process that consists of developing film through salt of iron which by oxidizing offers a characteristic reddish effect– he has managed to produce a collection of photographs in which the heaviness and equilibrium of the bodies becomes attuned with the palpitation of a blurry, natural, almost immaterialized ambience.

"Surprise" invites us to focus on the adjoining reality rather on remoteness. The series deals with the effort to reveal all that is hidden, transmitting, albeit, “pleasant sensations, expressed in a perturbing, dramatic and oppressive way”, in Barrantes’ own words. The scenes are embellished with marine landscape details alongside human bodies and animals. All the photographs are taken from the earth surface. Following this, the participation of all elements in these compositions is equal, despite the fact that they appear fragmented or small. A fragile and ambiguous, but at the same time, overly natural world emerges before us. It is a world devoid of any hierarchical order; a world in which animals are transformed into the protagonists of the scenery and nature becomes dignified. Fragmentation, a systematic distortion of proportions and the presence of diagonal cuts insinuate the whole against a background replete of unsettling surprises. Although the gaze induces us to select just a part of the “Other”, the ambience interferes in our dialogue with it. It is, undoubtedly, all about these marvellous human acts that illuminate our everyday life, causing us, with their lack of visual sense, a certain uneasiness. The unknown always unsettles the gaze. For the realization of the prints of this series, Carlos Barrantes has used Platinotype, a 19th century photographic process with excellent visual results that confer a rich tonal variety to the final image.

"Beyond the Horizon" is a photographic statement of Kavafian style about the horizon as an excuse for the journey to Ithaca, about the so to speak eternal search of this inexistent line between our own border and the illusory, whereby meaning rather than destiny is all that matters. The series, a total of 40 photographs in black and white –showing here 5 out of them– recompiles images from the sea, the mountains, the paths and forests. “We embark on the journey in order to get to know ourselves,” affirms Barrantes. “We are aware that the horizon is a fictitious line; when we reach it we know that it does not exist anymore as such and then we have another horizon before us”. The landscape makes its presence in the series as the “excuse to go deeper into ourselves, or at least, to create a state of mood in this encounter”. The landscape, “a place in which suavity of water is transformed into a stony hardness, and movement is blurred with calmness”, becomes an exterior onto which our inner self search is projected. Printed with the Platinotype process that guarantees rich textures and volumes in black and white, the images of the series possess a rigid but sensual monumentality.

The exhibition ends with "Some day, let's leave (Un jour partons / Un día partimos").

"Comment Gata se réincarne en livre. Un jour la belle chatte avec ses grandes oreilles sourdes est partie. Ses images sont là sans forme, simples souvenirs, jusqu’à ce qu’un jour, Baudelaire arrive avec «Les Fleurs du Mal» et modèle son fantôme. Gata s’étire, ronronne, et chemine vers sa nouvelle vie."

With this artist book, edited in Spanish and French in a limited edition of 15 copies, Carlos Barrantes closes the circle of his artistic production of the last ten years. Constructed upon unpublished images or images previously produced for other series (among them, Surprise) and now reworked digitally, the book offers a collection of original prints that interlaces with extracts from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. The verses of Baudelaire, who was more than once inspired by cats, adorn these photographs and their principal muse, the Cat. On the other hand, the photographer expresses a fascination for his beloved animal, while registering it photographically as a ghostly apparition. For one more time, the camera dignifies nature and becomes one with it. Engendered on the earth level, the photographer’s viewpoint distorts and maximizes the presence of his protagonist being within the frame. The elaboration of the digital pigment process Giclée at the moment of printing, enriches these pictures with singular nuances oscillating between b/w and colour, accentuating their ambiguous and yet unique dreamful quality.

Carlos Barrantes

Photographer and printer / Madrid, 1960

Structured in series including “Movement”, “Surprise”, “Chillida territory”, “Beyond the Horizon”, “I Am” and “Some day, let's leave”, Carlos Barrantes’ photographic work, has been exhibited both in Spain and in several other European countries (Fundacio Miro, Majorca; PARIS PHOTO 2002 et 2004, Paris; World Trade Center, Bremen; the Institute Cervantes, Moscow, and elsewhere) and forms part of both public and private collections, (including the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris; Ordonez-Falcon Collection, San Sebastian; Rafael Tous Collection, Barcelona; Centro Andaluz de la Fotografia, Junta de Andalucia, and others).

Carlos Barrantes carries on his shoulders a long professional trajectory on the field of fashion photography. Barrantes has collaborated with Pepe Botella and Javier Vallhonrat. He has been formed part of the Valentín Vallhonrat studio where he has carried out fashion projects, exhibitions, conservation, restoration and printing for Cristina García Rodero, Alberto Schommer and Javier Vallhonrat.

In 1993, Carlos Barrantes set up his own non-industrial photographic workshop. Specialized initially in Platinotype and other historical and alternative photo-chemical processes (salted and albumen paper, carbon printing, cyanotype, gum dichromate, Vandyke and Polaroid transfers), he has recently added the digital Giclée/Digigraphie pigment process in b/w and colour to his technical repertoire. His workshop being located originally in Palma de Majorca (Spain), in 2006 he moved it to Saint-Estève (near Perpignan) in the South of France. In this context, he works for other photographers, plastic artists and institutions in Spain, France and Latin America.

Barrantes also runs photographic workshops at a number of universities and institutions, (such as the École Nationale Supérieure Louis Lumière, Paris, France; the Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain; the Fundacio Miro, Majorca, Spain; Centre d’Art Bozart, Abidjan, Ivory Coast; among others).

All Images: © Carlos Barrantes www.carlosbarrantes.com/art.html

For more information and images, please contact: Natasha Christia / +34 93 487 35 88 / gallery@kowasa.com