30 May - 20 June 2024 - Solo show "Tuning in" Visual artist Alex Rispal Exhibition text written by curator Eugenia Amodio

Memory of a plant - 120 x 120 - Chemigram on gelatin silver paper

Under the urge to experiment and in an inexhaustible attempt to find an answer to the question: What reality do we find ourselves in? Àlex Rispal invites us to inhabit the liminal spaces that he constructs through the appropriation of the wonderful technique of the chemigram. This question materializes in a unique and very particular visual narrative, not only in terms of its finish but also in the process of creation.

The chemigram is a technique introduced by Pierre Cordier that merges photography and painting without fully belonging to either of these disciplines.

For these pieces, the artist uses silver gelatin paper, chemicals and reserves together with light exposure to create them. In this way, re signifies the development of analog photography to give it a pictorial meaning.

In his work, plants and televisions coexist in spaces that constantly challenge the limits of reality. Through a combination of chemical precision and chance, Rispal achieves a universe that reflects the duality between the natural and the artificial, framed in an environment that we could define as ethereal, a dimension between different phases, a parallel existence or a state of mind.

This space acts as a threshold between two realities and becomes an ambiguous terrain that the artist manipulates and transforms through the interaction of materials and the influence of light. The techniques used by Rispal include printing deformed photographic images on acetate paper and transferring them onto glass, using real plants that he places by contact on the varnished photosensitive paper and exposes them to sunlight to generate areas of color.

The televisions, on the other hand, are designed with artificial intelligence from images created by him and captured on the paper. In this way, the photosensitization of silver allows the artist to work with inks, paint and gelatin, using reserves of varnish, wax and adhesive tape to build his compositions. These techniques not only allow him to explore and combine different elements, but also to build a dialogue between the digital and the organic.

Thus, moving through a tonal range that goes from browns, grays and blacks to purple, we immerse ourselves in intimate and imaginary landscapes that arise from the artist's insatiable desire to explore the scope of photographic technique.

The relationship between the living and artificial elements that appear is experienced in his works as if it were in constant tension, however, there is something symbiotic between them. This is how the artist confronts us with this situation that becomes a mirror of our daily lives: the progressive disconnection of our authentic existence in a technological world.

The contrast between the illusory and the real is perhaps one of the fundamental concepts that constructs the body of work chosen for this exhibition.

When we approach and observe every detail and texture of the works, we also notice the presence of an inhospitable silence. It would seem that we are facing a post-apocalyptic event, a world that has ceased to be inhabited by human beings, where the battle between light and darkness has resulted in a multiverse where the existence of wild plants predominates and which still continue to relate to the backwardness of a society influenced by technological and communication demands.

It is at this point of intersection of dialectics, where the subtle and the tangible, the vital and the dead, the light and the dark coexist, that Rispal confronts us with the very essence of our human condition.

TUNED is probably an invitation to reflect on the place we occupy, on the speed of the moment and on the system of which we are a part. Is it that the only way to treasure a fraction of time is to return to the beginning of all things?

Eugenia Amodio.