Author: Ricardo Cases.
Date: September 25th to November 27th.
Venue: Josep Renau Hall,Faculty of Fine Arts, UPV.
Ricardo Cases’ Levante is a universe made of light, surprise, precariousness and chaos. A country without rules, unstable, fascinating and hallucinatory that somehow condenses the spirit of contemporary Spain.
Ricardo Cases (Orihuela, 1971) is one of the bridgeheads of the renewal that has placed Spain on the maps of contemporary photography worldwide at the turn of the century. He has a background in photojournalism, his contact with the BlankPaper collective in the mid-2000s and the shared passion and feedback for photography ignited the flame of a waterfall of free creation;
From his earliest works, his highly personal work is full of radicalism, vitality and humor, and impregnated with an anthropological and ultimately tender gaze towards his subjects, always involuntary representatives of the Spanish. An intuitive photographer, he polished his procedures until he managed to get ahead of himself and end up hunting for truths that perhaps he would later take months to decipher. His most recent work flies higher, sophisticated his language and taking many more artistic risks, but without ever losing
the playful background, the capacity for astonishment and the enthusiasm for photography (and life in its broadest sense) understood as a game.
In all these years of work, his critical but sincere fascination for the Iberian has been creating, in the laboratory scale that is the Levantine orchard, a complex imaginary that contains the keys to Spain, but above all the keys to what is Spanish.
In 2017 he was awarded the Culture Prize of the Community of Madrid, making the following year an extensive exhibition of his work that brought together the works Paloma al aire, Podría haberse evitado, Estudio elemental del Levante, Sol and El porqué de las naranjas, and that constitutes a powerful symbolic corpus that configures the universe of the Levante as a colorful, anarchic, wild and disconcerting place.
And yet, absolutely recognizable to any Spaniard.
Welcome to this disturbing Wonderland.
Chaos mechanics
I saw a river in Paris
a prop de sa torre gris.
I have seen a parigües esqueixat,
all mechanisms.
Antònia Font
At first glance, here and now, one would think that reality is a chaotic and anarchic evolution. A headless, illogical and unpredictable mess. If there is a logic, it is hidden behind a layer of banality so thick as to make it invisible. However, in some specific moments, life gets careless and reveals itself; the automaton shows its entrails and fleetingly reveals its mechanism, the logic of chaos that explains everything to us.