Chemamadoz

No photographer anywhere can rival the intelligent simplicity of Chema Madoz’s visual jokes. With his beautifully photographed constructions of optical puns, Madoz has taken up the Dadaist and Surrealist heritage of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, René Magritte, and Meret Oppenheim. His work poses answers to unasked, even unimagined, questions in the most polite and elegant manner.
Madoz’s work is based on this conundrum: here it is, how did it come to be? The fact that the artist doesn’t title his work puts the onus on the viewer to make sense of what is going on in each individual image. The impossible, or at least, the very unlikely, are combined. Bluntly put, therein lies the fun and attraction of his art. Like Man Ray and one of his early ready-mades, Cadeau (Gift) of 1921, the nail-studded iron, Madoz invents improbable things, such as a juxtaposition of letters that spells “cup” while actually forming the image of that vessel, or a staple gun measured against a “ruler” made of staples, a garden path where stepping stones are actually puddles, or a campfire made of what clearly are pencils. Another key example of Madoz’s visual play is a clock where all the hours shown are numbered five.
Indeed, the instruments of rationality―clocks, protractors, compasses, and sundials―are subverted with a brilliant humor to produce the most beautiful visual gags. It is as if M. S. Escher had worked with Groucho Marx. Madoz’s theme on the variations of sundials is a case in point. One uses a woman’s high heel as the gnomon. For another, a garden rake is used. Yet another series shows five sundials arranged as though in an international hotel with the names of their respective cities displayed below them: Helsinki, New York, Rome, Paris, and Los Angeles. They all point to almost one o’clock in the afternoon, a logical impossibility.
Madoz’s concern with the irrational use of rational objects is best seen in his image of a magnifying glass on the right-hand page of a book discussing Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of the science of semiotics or the study of signs, and, inevitably, Magritte whose famous painting of a pipe, entitled Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a Pipe, 1928-29) is also known as “the treachery of images.” On the left-hand page, the letters and the words have been burned out as through the use of the magnifier. The magnified words on the right-hand page, however, refer to Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of signs. A text just above reads: “A word used for an object may be another word, too. The object may be replaced by a word. Interchangeability and replaceability destroy the credibility of the established signs on either side.” This is the very root of Madoz’s game. Where he earlier repurposed objects, he now repurposes signifiers. The things in his images are treacherous. The logical becomes illogical. Nothing is as it seems to be, nor does it play its assigned role in our belief system or, let alone, in our everyday experience. Despite all the serious intellectual play with signs and signifiers, Madoz’s work is subtly hilarious.
Freedom of the imagination, the freedom to imagine the unlikely and to render it seductive and seemingly real, is, ultimately, what Madoz does in creating his photography. His improbable objects of desire are true fantasy made manifest by the magic of photography.