Ignasiaball

The representation of time and the limits of representation in photography itself are the driving factors behind the art of Ignasi Aballí. For years he has worked with photographing reflections of famous paintings in museums, for example, or the discoloration of cardboard that had been lying in the sun. He has further held a dialogue with representations of photography and media, especially words and images cut from newspapers and magazines that he assembles and re-photographs. It is a singularly consistent project that he has carried out with themes and variations across the media to great international acclaim.

His work Calendario 2003 Diario (Calendar 2003 Diary) consists of twelve panels replicating the front pages of the newspapers he read for a year. Other series involve images of gardens and the images of poisonous plants installed in the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid-- the last place one would expect to find Malas Hierbas. The photos were deliberately left to fade in the intense sun of the garden and effect a literal representation of the passage of time as the images are effaced.

This is nowhere more interesting than in the case of his Cantadores (Street Corners, 2003). This series functions as a typology, as pure documentation, and a metaphorical art-historical dialogue with text, painting, and photography. The twenty-six individual images recall the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet (the Spanish alphabet has thirty, including loan letters). These images are of the nearly identical postwar council houses around the museum district of central Amsterdam where many of the streets near the great museums, the Rijksmuseum, the Stedlijk, and the Museum Van Gogh, bear the names of famous painters from European history. The street corners are nearly all photographed from the same point of view, directly opposite the corner of the building on whose two walls are the street signs bearing the painters’ names.

Alballí’s method puts him straight in the tradition of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the legendary photographers-teachers from the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts whose epic series of identically photographed industrial buildings defined much of the aesthetic of postwar photography. The minor variations—a flower here, differently colored bricks there, and even a few rounded corners—suggest a certain human dimension that exists within Dutch conformity. Yet the play with the street names is remarkable for suggesting relationships between painters that would not automatically come to mind in addition to more obvious ones. Jan van Ejck and Breughel, Memling and Jan van Ejck, Raphael and Veronese make sense at an intuitive level. Courbet and Michelangelo or Michelangelo and Millet, perhaps less so. The game, like Brazilian soccer, is beautiful.

At first glance the works are hermetic at several levels. They are pure photography. They are typologies. Yet, they play the game at more beautiful levels. What ideas are suggested by the mere graphic representation of the name of a famous artist? What does a Michelangelo, Rubens, Titian, or a Velázquez (who is conveniently paired with Rubens by the Amsterdam city fathers—themselves a worthy subject for a certain Rembrandt van Rijn and whatever artistic planning commission) conjure up in the imagination? The number of famous paintings is totally limitless. Such is the power of mere suggestion that these names evoke in us. What Aballí, in the wake of the naming commission, suggests is a world of influences, of direct and indirect relationships through time. Their portrait styles and subjects are totally different although they are extremely influential for later artists. They identified themselves differently on religious grounds, one opting for a cooler style and the other for a more exuberant palette. Yet it is possible to look at their works in myriad styles.

Such is the power of Aballí’s work. He is able to take an artistically rigorous body of work, directly seen street corners, and transform it into a meditation on the history of ideas and the history of painting by the mere representation of the names of famous artists whose names were given to the street in a quiet part of Amsterdam. Aballí is able to bring about this multi-dimensional game with the production of twenty-six simple photographs.

Aballí elevates contemporary photography to a metaphorical level by combining concepts and modes of representation that test the limits of straight photography. His camera-based work becomes more than, as Edward Weston so long ago said, “the thing itself.” It becomes more than photography itself. That is the art of Ignasi Aballí.