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CON LOS PIES EN LA TIERRA - Maxi Limeres
31 January - 24 February
UNEASY LANDSCAPES
Mónica Álvarez Careaga
Under the extraordinary technical perfection of Maxi Limeres’ photos lies an immense hidden sentiment. Invoking the forces that the Romantic Movement awoke in Western art with its powerful tools: darkness, magnificence, grandiosity, desolation, the supposed photographic objectiveness that places the creator in an impossible role of a neutral documentalist, Limeres opens the possibility to a different, individual, contemplation of the world. The election of a quite unusual genre as landscape is in today’s art, and an openly pictorial aesthetics has defined a work that is much about taking a stance.
The forest was destroyed a long time ago and the meadows divided by paths, abandoned later; the coast transformed by the fishing grounds with their tanks and store houses. The factories devastated life a long time ago with their chaotic and utilitarian growth. The natural has been disfigured by our culture of exploitation and it has ceased to exist if not as an element of the social imaginary.
As witnesses of all the changes, these close landscapes make us uneasy. They do not show avalanches, storms, nor cataclysms, only the storage of time whose power is in the rust, in what is abandoned. These bare places take on an archaeological component as we contemplate the absence of human beings in them; they portray our transforming – civilisating – actions, they register our inhibition, our stubbornness, our greed… and in spite of this, they find a new meaning, they pose a mirror that reflects the transcendence of the image. We are what we have been and what we insist on being.
Absorbed in contemplation, Maxi Limeres’ images trap us because the alchemy in them has displaced technology, the wise reflections from aquatic surfaces, the delicate shades of the clouds… they enclose a beat of life, a new devotion, a wild heart.
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