Valladolid,
The photographer Juan del Junco maintained a very close relationship with the birds since his childhood: his father was a ornithologist, and he a great fan of biology. Therefore, most of their images and videos are populated with animals, especially birds and insects: we apparently are facing pieces of scientific channel, but a second reading reveals in their works possible symbolic interpretations and an emotional aspect. References to the links between human beings and the landscape are continuous, in particular to the way in which the individual obtains information from nature, analyzes it and tries to dominate it with or without success.
Born in Jerez de la Frontera in 1972, Del Junco has lived and worked in Seville and its beginnings, around 2000, they developed from the hand of the collective The Richard Channin Foundation, of which he was part with Miki Leal and Fernando Clemente. The three took as a starting point what could be called “media culture” to devise pieces characterized by their irony and their playful sense.
Together with that group he made his first exhibition, in the Cavecanem gallery, in which he showed images that were narratives but also possessed a conceptual character: we could consider them scenographies designed in which they have both real and metaphorical place; In short, science and art. His vision of the environment, and sometimes also about the rural environment, is not that of a romantic traveler who travels through a field that he hardly knows and idealizes, but a prosaic look, which captures the beautiful and the next time and transmits knowledge of the land.
Until next September 28, Del Junco offers at the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid “that great stretch that – in flight – separates the two seas dry stones. Refers, in fact, to Photopath (1967) by Victor Bugin: a real -size photographs path, equally placed on the ground, which every time it was exposed should be remaked. Halfway between minimalism and conceptual art, image, performance and installation Site specificthis British project proposed a reinterpretation of photography focused both inland, to the properties of the environment itself, and outside, to the points where it connects with the environment and with other art forms.
The Jerez declares Burgin’s debtor, but he distances himself from his purposes in his love for deepening what is his own, in his experiences: Birds and Earth are part of his world in the creative and vital sense. In the walls, around that photographic terroir, we will contemplate different series touring the perimeter of room 8; They are formed as a set of publications, each with its cover, articulated in thorough reticles: all the images gathered have their size (40 x 30 centimeters) and their ordination obeys common patterns, but it is in its content where different readings arise, derived, of course, of the flight of the birds or their nests. They travel between the north and the south, the sea and the earth, the abstraction and the icon; Occasionally these are fortuitous sightings, casual encounters. Between your maritime transfer is the dryland. And Moran, yes, in perfect, clear and centered nests, of which the German tradition has given so much.
The disposition of his works in Patio Herreriano is not novel in Del Junco: interested in the conceptual photography of half a century ago, uses small formats but tends to group their compositions in series that vertebrate much broader policies. He has never stopped using white and black, looking for textures through visible grain and capturing birds almost always in flight, his ephemeral and cyclical movement. He learned being very young, in addition to his habits and his shelter places, from the locations from which he could see them and accompanied those images of texts and publications; The latter must not understand them as the documentary expression of their proposals, but as a material part of them. Faced with the programmatic purity of those conceptuals he admired, as we said, he incorporated the autobiography seal.
Juan del Junco. “That great stretch that – even in flight – separates the two seas drying”
Herrerian Patio Museum
C/ Jorge Guillén, 6
Valladolid
From April 5 to September 28, 2025
