Chema Madoz and the malleable real

Madrid,

Books, candles, knives, feathers, lamps and practically every everyday object have an inexhaustible evocative potential for Chema Madoz, who has based his entire career on them and on the exploration of the capacity of the image to harbor mysteries and not to exhaust itself in itself and in its first contemplation.

The Madrid photographer continually appeals to the intuition and imaginative faculty of the public to make them an accomplice in his interpretive metaphors, often with more than one reading, and his games of logic. His procedure is always similar: he works in black and white, decontextualizing certain utensils to give them new meanings (in the beginning, his references were the ready-mades of Duchamp and surrealism).

Some of these compositions may generate concern, many allude to the human desire to escape or resist and the fundamental presence of the idea of play, and of suspended or tricked games, is also very common in their proposals. In short, each of his scenes is an invitation for the viewer to look in a different way, to feel challenged by what is very close and takes him to the terrain of subjectivity, finding what is in his environment that is unexpected and latent, the sensuality in the utilitarian and also the multiple options in the theoretically unitary.

The preparation of his photos is apparently simple, and always with natural light, but everything about them is meticulous: the size and weight of the chosen objects is determined with precision; also the scale at which they are shown to us. Modifying or accentuating some of its features opens up a map of numerous possibilities for us, but Madoz ensures that this very careful formal resolution does not annul the notion that the material is a reflection of what is thought, given that its ultimate objective is to portray abstract ideas, thoughts and not realities.

He begins by executing preliminary synthetic and pencil sketches, to then design ordered compositions that, contrary to the opinion of critics and gallery owners, he does not want to expose as sculptural constructions, without the filter of photography, understanding that they do not constitute finished works. The taking of the image constitutes, for him, the purely creative phase, the stage in which the given objects become something different, an entity with its own sensitivity (into pearls if we talk about drops, into straps if we talk about rules, etc.).

The artist’s fifth individual show at the Elvira González gallery in Madrid will begin on May 5, as part of the PHotoESPAÑA festival program. It will bring together recent works, carried out in 2024 and 2025 and once again born from intuition, discovery and a Magrittian influence, in relation to the meeting of two disparate elements, whose union breaks logic and merges the close and the strange. He displays them, as always, in those black and white tones that, for the author, refer to childhood and dreams.

We will see objects that Madoz already used, although with different uses: a cage, but now open; The birds that have escaped from it perch, on this occasion, on different geographical points on a map. In another image, a falconry glove holds, instead of the claws of a bird of prey, a butterfly. The expected does not arrive: these works demonstrate that the material not only houses evidence and that objects, no matter how much we domesticate them, contain something for them.

In Madoz’s words: For me, in some way each object has a word or concepts chained to it that are determined by its use, form or ability to evoke. Playing with them when determining their position or interrelationship with others alters and multiplies the possible meanings. It opens gaps in perception and gives us an idea of reality that is tremendously malleable. Miraculous.