ULTRAFOTOGRAFÍA 

Martínez Bellido, Marta Bisbal, Xisco Bonnín, Iñaki Domingo, Inma Femenía, Jorge Isla, Alejandro Javaloyas, Marta Pujades, Miguel Ángel Tornero, Evarist Torres, Cecilia de Val, and Simon Zabell

Curator: Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta

Light just before forming the image; light just after. Ultraphotography transcends the conventional concept of photography to surpass it in the most extraordinary and simplest way: by returning to its origin, to what is essential, fundamental, basic. A physical, aesthetic, optical, luminous, formal, and conceptual exploration that seeks to overflow photography’s boundaries and delve fully into what lies beyond—in this ultraphotography that speaks to us of light and beauty, of technique and medium, of magic and science, of reproduction and uniqueness. A photography that does not carry the rhetoric of post-photography nor the narrativity of documentary; a photography without photos, without a camera; an experimental and (photo)sensitive photography.
The artists participating in the project embrace the full autonomy of photography—not as a medium but as an end in itself. They investigate and formalize works that are the object, the subject, and the artwork all at once; the cause and the effect; the reason and the emotion. This leads them down a path where figuration and narrative vanish, and where the immaterial physical consistency of a new visuality arises: telescopic, microscopic, fractal, analog, and digital—a new way of seeing that brings us closer to a new (ir)reality, the one Paul Éluard identified in each of us: there are other worlds, but they are in this one; there are other lives, but they are within the same person.[1]

This ultraphotography explores the infinite, the universe, the micro and macrocosm—but also the intimate, the personal, the individual. An ultra photography that encourages the drift of those explorers, those image-seekers who do not pursue fable or story, who develop works that are independent, object-based, yet also ethereal and immaterial—perhaps indecipherable, simple, and contradictory. The artist must understand the incomprehensible; photograph the invisible; achieve the unattainable. For this reason, science turns to art to explain the inexplicable.

These are the points of intersection where the physical moves toward the metaphysical, and the material connects with the spiritual—where our own reflected image transmutes into a complex mirage, where light is broken down into all the colors of the spectrum, where sensitive beings maintain their curiosity as they trace the infinite script of a Möbius strip with their index finger,[2] making the unreachable accessible, measuring the unfathomable. All of this takes place, as so often happens in the history of photography, in that space where every ending is a new beginning—where image seekers search without haste.

[1] Luciano Rincón, Cartas cruzadas entre Paul Éluard y Teofrasto Bombasto de Hohenheim llamado Paracelso, Los Libros de la Frontera, Barcelona, 1976, pàg. 14 i 136.
[2] A type of surface named after one of its discoverers: August Ferdinand Möbius (Schulpforta, Germany, 1790 – Leipzig, Germany, 1868).