Madrid,
José Guerrero trained as a technical architect, but after passing through the Art School of Granada and after obtaining the young Andalusian author of Caja San Fernando, which allowed him to develop a photographic project linked to the ephemeral and fragmentary, he began his career about twenty years ago in the field of the image, since then linked to reflection around spaces and landscapes.
Under the influence of Luis Barragán’s constructions and the visual production of Robert Adams and Luigi Ghirri, he began to be interested in the places turned into a border and the tensions that, in the aesthetic and conceptual, are own: between the rural and urban environment, the abstract creation and the document, the motives and their representation, the lights and the shadows, the chance and the chance.
In each of its series this author does not seek defined stories, but generate a lyrical tone derived from the sequencing of scenes and the delicate management of light, color and atmospheres applied to nature, architectures, archeologies and at the passage of time and the human footprint on them.
Its largest individual sample has just opened its doors at the headquarters in Madrid of the Mapfre Foundation, after hosting Kbr in Barcelona; She has been curated by Marta Gili, who was director for twelve years of the Jeu de Paume, and reviews her career to date, also, with new photographs made, commissioned by this institution, in the Medina de Fez, in Morocco. They prove the consideration of the landscape, by Guerrero, as an enigma with cultural, social and collective dimensions and related to time and memory: for the Granada -also for other artists of his generation -, photographing a territory is not only to portray a place in its physical sense, but also the relationships, alterations and tensions it contains, irremediably associated with the human. Their landscapes have, for that reason, a lot of characters and time to make them protagonists of their series celebrates their mutual differences, their role as intervening in the identity of their inhabitants and as intervened by it. In short, as a melting pot of meanings.
When he uses conventions of contemporary photography of natures and architectures (theatrical skies, marked horizons, saturated colors) he does it consciously, trying to attract the spectator to land that is familiar to him, but from that start what Guerrero proposes us to abound in the ties, out of necessity, between reality and fiction, and therefore go beyond the simple contemplation. The exposure route is raised in a narrative way, but attends to conduct threads of a diverse nature, which sometimes have to do with the greater or lesser degree of representation or abstraction, of transparency or opacity, and others with the transit of the luminosity to the dark.
It is articulated in six sections, the first one for the imaginary horizons, those lines that do not appear on any map but that determine our vision of heaven and earth, and focus their stain series, with ocher tones that suggest the different moments of the crops; or of sheds, huts or constructions of fortune, shelters that allude to the dependence of the populations with respect to their nearby lands. Vallas, limits and fences remember that landscape organization implies political, social and economic reasons; It has little to do with desire. This section is part of its first sets, Ephemeralalready linked to the sedimentation and stratification of human constructions in place before and now, of the center or the periphery.
One of his main projects led Guerrero to Carrara and his white marble quarries, an obvious example of the historical and massive exploitation of natural resources. This Tuscan site was interested in both his geology and his precisely historical resonances: he did not want to look at crystalline whites, but in the oppressive forcefulness of their vertical walls, which keep mystery and move. In front of whiteness, the darkness of the subsoil prevails.
Your love for strata (of material, time, memory) is also noticed in the section Archeologieswhere the very significant documentary awaits us Rome 3 Variazionithat the Granada author carried out during his scholarship at the Academy of Spain in Rome with the composer Antonio Blanco. He was filmed in the underground interiors of the Claudio aqueduct and in a cave next to the Mediterranean, capturing images and sounds that, in their words, generate a dramaturgy in three acts whose sequence is metaphorically relate to the ideas of origin, transit and final or rebirth. All from the ground and from the water, fluid, loud and very suggestive.
With those cited works connected Gapsa series of vertical landscapes in which the horizon becomes a promise of light. Guerrero began this proposal in a limestone quarry, between guest and Castril, to prolong it in the aforementioned streets of Fez, resorting to exaggerated frames, precise scales, geometries, light flashes that seem so close to the real as Imaginary.
His gaze to Barragán tells the Mapfre Foundation with his own section: after photographing the pool of Casa Gilardi and the hole of the stairs of his Mexican house-stud, satisfied by the graphic and abstract result of the images, Guerrero undertook the series BRGprepared from models built by himself based on both the buildings of Barragán and those present in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Thus raised the need to question how much we observe, how plausible that fictitious architectures can become, the truths that artifice can be.
And close the route of this exhibition, the most important until now of the author, one of his most recent series, still ongoing: GFK. Printed its large format fruits as tapestries or canvases, derives from random errors in digital files; On this occasion, their textures will reveal the absence of landscape in their opacity.
Marta Gili pointed out today that, unlike the traditional ones, Guerrero’s scenarios are dynamic, they never offer beautiful postcards, but do not deny a possible and multiform beauty, and contain a reading of the history of their environment: of the theoretically objective capture to the strict vision of their own.
“José Guerrero. About the landscape”
Mapfre Foundation
Recoletos Paseo, 23
Madrid
From June 5 to August 24, 2025
