Introduction by Josep Fabrega Agea , Art and Photography Critic.
I would like to make a long and necessary introduction that gives us an idea of the courage and groundbreaking modernity signified by the works of Cristóbal Carretero Cassinello.
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The street photography developed in the last five years is part of the theoretical transformation of the eighties, the conquest of the museums, passing through the arrival of the new technologies in the 90s, when photography ended up consolidating itself as an important member within the contemporary artistic field. Here emerges the concept “photography useless ”, which establishes photography as an autonomous artistic medium, as opposed to Descriptive photography of previous generations, characterized by social reporting. More recently, the first criticisms of pure photographic realism, the strict street documentary and aesthetic lines of thought are produced that are symptomatic of a of postmodern thought, to the current context in which technology has given rise to the debate on “postphotography”.
At this point a new way of working is consolidated: conceptual series based on visual material, not necessarily photographs of a documentary nature. Paraphrasing Joan Fontcuberta, “the absence of strict documentary truth does not suppose any trauma or anguish, rather it appears as something fascinating and natural at the service of the underlying intellectual project. ” Post-photography where we can establish that it is the content and not the form that gives unity to a very critical observation of the use of technology taken exclusively at the service of the obvious truth and not of the underlying truth.
Cassinello goes beyond strict documentaryism; more than purely formal features and descriptive, the photographer enters into that obsessive desire to make us doubt what he is and what an image can be, and at the same time expanding the limits of expressive vocabulary photographic towards his personal surreal vision of shapes, color, light, midtones and shadows. The raw material of what reaches our pupil and our intellectual interpretation. In short, the renewal of street photography that only few authors are producing, that is: the progress of the photographic medium from its questioning. The image as a pretext and intellectual support for the sole service of intellectual content or leivmotiv of each project.
Dynamite conventional reality with the new photographic reality, through diptychs, optical illusions, form contrasts and sophisticated trompe l’oeil that, however, in its progression give coherence and narrative to the project. Having made this introduction to Cristóbal’s new Teleport project: where is the message, concept, thread that leads us? The images or perhaps we should say better, the visual material leads us to a revelation of hidden doors of time invisible to the human eye but not to the camera lens and defining of the frame that allows us to travel in time so often longed for. Is a evocation of the unknown, of the not evident, of the not visible even if we have it before our sight.
That real or unreal imagination of traveling in space time is a way of converting into conceptual reality, what without the filter of the camera and the framework of the concept they would be simple observations of daily life. In Cassinello’s words “Teleport will make us sound at the speed of light, it will make us accomplices of the great Argonaut journey of matter through space-time, described in the equations Albert Einstein’s General Relativity. Wormholes that lie in invisibility apparent. They will reveal to us a new temporary reality, a pulse to reason and the search chimerical man of coincident parallel universes in the past, present and future. ” It is here where Cristóbal is brave, iconoclastic, and flees from aesthetic, compositional and topics of street photography to navigate in your own personal and creative universe. His works are the most original that there is today in the photographic scene and set trends inside and outside our borders, because I fear that the photography of Strictly documentary street is creatively exhausted.
For more information visit www.cccassinello.com
