Javiervallhonrat

One of Spain’s best-known artists, Javier Vallhonrat has used photography to explore the interfaces of photography, painting, sculpture, and performance for more than twenty-five years. He has paid close attention to the role of the body both in its physical form and as a vehicle for metaphor. Not surprisingly, Vallhonrat also had an internationally successful career as a fashion photographer. Both his personal photography and his commercial work are based on the mise-en-scène as the starting point for critical analysis. He has written that “Photography allows us to position ourselves at an intermediate point—between the purely everyday and the instrumental. That is, it can be considered as an instrument of persuasion in a consumer society. . . . But at the same time, It allows us to act with a radically opposite intention: such as the drive to use the artistic project in order to make possible the experience of constructing the self.”

This vision of photography has been at the root of Vallhonrat’s work since he began in the early nineteen-eighties with studies of a performance piece with Marisa Teigell involving painted fabrics. It was a “project with the human body that allowed [him] to relate to a present and tangible reality and, at the same time, to another parallel de-contexturalized reality that made photography possible: a hybridization, crossbreeding, and rupture of the documentary context.” It broke with the “formal purism” of traditional Spanish photography of the time and set the tone for his future explorations.
The temporality and precariousness of the objects and situations he photographs (and more lately builds into videos) are for him the building blocks of narratives that he uses to explore truth and meaning in photography. It is a game of proportion and representation of space played out through the medium of photography and sets the stage for his master series, Acaso (2001–03).
Acaso means “perhaps” in Spanish and continues Vallhonrat’s exploration of contingency and representation. This series incorporates ideas of illusion as a means of questioning the limits of photographic representation. It further reintroduces the body into his art photography and, with it, a new, more human, yet totally enigmatic and critical narrative.

Vallhonrat pulls out all the rhetorical and representational tricks photography has to offer. He writes in his introduction to the work, “Using the metaphor of place, Acaso explores individual identity and the concept of belonging. A place is a privileged space of memory and experience that nourishes the feeling of belonging . . . I explore, through objects, places, and actions, ideas such as belonging, identity, the construction process, and the transformation process. The actions, objects, and places shown in the images occupy a central position; they are the immediate subjects of visual representation. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is ghostly, a no-man’s-land between reality, dreams, and the fantasy found in children’s stories.” As he puts it, “the raw material of the images in Acaso is emotion.”

Acaso is a journey into Javier Vallhonrat’s psyche, an excavation of his unconscious, and his flight through the world of symbolic images, dreams, and representations in photography. It is a world both two- and three-dimensional, real and artificial. The structures—houses, cabins, huts, tents, nests, caves—recur in different manifestations and some, indeed, from his previous works—represent places of reason, a face, a site of memory and belonging separate from that which is outside. The doors and windows permit communication, serve as eyes and mouths, yet they are inherently vulnerable. The very fragility of the structures, often of light plastics, glass, wood, or nylon, models the limits of intelligence (permanence) and the contingency of passing time. Even the outlines of structures sketched in lights strung from wires delimit the edges of reason and of what is possible yet prepare the flight across the water and the continued drive to create some sort of meaning out of a realm of changing mysteries, the surface of a lake. A man in contemporary clothing finds precarious shelter perched on a platform above the water. For how long, who can say?
Vallhonrat’s “Everyman” figure, not unlike that of Robert ParkeHarrison, willfully explores his world and attempts to construct meaning, permanence, and a sense of belonging yet seems undermined by the forces of nature and by his own reflected self. In this space of dreams, the fragments of memory and lost civilizations recur in a Borgesian game of scale and representation, beautiful and uncanny. Vallhonrat’s world shape-shifts its way through perspective. Reflections in water exist where there are no objects to cast them. The maquette of a road tunnel gives way to a real tunnel and vice versa. Underground entrances lead into wormholes of subterranean memory. Boxed shapes above the surface reflect similar holes in floors or the ground. All is interpenetrated by uncertainty. A tunnel―the same one, perhaps, perhaps not―opens into light.

“I like shaking things up,” Javier Vallhonrat writes. “[I want to talk about] what fascinates me, and what has the potential for spreading the capacity for wonder. Is it possible?” Perhaps, perhaps yes.