Javier Silva Meinel, a real thinker

Paris. Javier Silva Meinel (born in 1949) should no longer remain on the fringes of the major figures of Latin American photography commonly exhibited in France. Obtaining a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in North America in 1990 opened the doors to a certain number of American museums and collections. But it was only in 2019 that he was represented in Europe, with an exhibition organized by Galerie Younique in Paris, followed by a second in 2025. Today, the Peruvian photographer is benefiting for the first time from an institutional exhibition in France. The monograph devoted to him by the Maison de l’Amérique Latine, in association with the gallery, marks a new stage in his career for Javier Silva Meinel, and constitutes for the visitor a delightful discovery both in terms of the content of the photographs and the quality of the prints.

His poetic view of his country, with its theatrical reality, is significant, as in his photographs of street theater troupes or this portrait of a woman with eyes covered with fish. But also in this portrait of the archaeologist Maria Reiche (1903-1998), seen from behind sitting on a chair, alone in the immensity of the desert plains of southern Peru, facing the Nazca geoglyphs whose enigma she tried, all her life, to elucidate.

For more than forty years, Javier Silva Meinel has photographed Peru during his travels. “Traveling was a way of getting to know my country,” he explains. And this, while always taking the time to meet and build a relationship with those he portrays.

The return to Lima opened up another space-time for him: that of his workshop where he seeks in printing the right incarnation of what he wishes to express. The real and the fable, the allegorical or the dreamlike intertwine in Silva Meinel, whether in self-portraits, portraits or photographs of animals, rituals or landscapes. “It is not so much reality that leads me to create as the desire to go beyond it,” he emphasizes.

The studio backdrop

The photographs selected and presented by theme by Alejandro León Cannock, curator of the exhibition, give the measure. Based on his work in the archives of Silva Meinel, the teacher-researcher in France and Peru offers an in-depth and fluid reading of the approach of an author with a photographic itinerary marked by two key moments: the first meeting, in 1971, with the Peruvian filmmaker Mary Jimenez (born in 1948), a friend living in his neighborhood with whom he discovered, “fascinated”, the process of image development. A meeting followed six years later by the discovery of the work of Martín Chambi (1891-1973). “This exhibition played a decisive role in the conception of the photographic medium when he noted, in one of his photographs, the subtle appearance behind the canvas background which serves as decoration, of the face of one of Chambi’s assistants, specifies Alejandro León Cannock in the catalog. The recognition of this structure in the image determines the photograph not as an objective document of the external world or a subjective expression of the creative spirit, but as a representation constructed by a set of gestures, practices, knowledge. »

This device of the backdrop (monochrome or covered with a decoration), traditionally used, from the beginnings of the medium, for portraiture in photography studios or by itinerant photographers, Javier Meinel reinvents and broadens its uses. The selection of photographs on this theme is particularly eloquent and sometimes contains enigmatic images, such as this portrait of a young boy, his feet in the water, his head emerging from an immense square of white canvas held at arm’s length, falling to his mid-thigh. [voir ill.] ; or this portrait of a man with a slender face, wearing a hat, splitting the canvas halfway, his eyes fixed on the person looking at him.

The conceptual dimension of the work is at the heart of the exhibition by Alejandro León Cannock around the notion of an image as a threshold. Concept of the threshold that we find in the title of the exhibition “ Umbrales » and who “synthesizes, crystallizes the experience we have when faced with Javier’s images. They are not documents of reality nor an expression of Javier’s interiority, but are a question, a mystery, a strangeness which activates thought, makes us dream.