Patrik Grijalvo

Patrik Grijalvo - Arsenale, Venice

Technique: Medium format analog photograph, with ISO 400 film, digitized and printed on Hahnemühle Fine Art Photo Rag paper with pigmented inks. printed on Hahnemühle Fine Art Photo Rag paper with pigmented inks, mounted in an American oak frame.

Artist Biography: Patrik Grijalvo Millois is a visual artist born in Bilbao in 1984, with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country with a specialization in audiovisual image and photography. Since 2009, he has participated in residencies at BilbaoArte, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Rotterdam, the City of Arts in Paris and the Seoul Museum of Art. He has also received several awards and grants, including the Premio Joven Artes Plásticas de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, second prize in the photography competition Alianza Francesa and the Fundación Pilar Citoler, and the SWAB and Mango Collection award for the best young artist at the fair.Grijalvo Millois considers himself an artist since he found his own technical, aesthetic and conceptual discourse. For him, artistic restlessness is what leads him to think and act differently and makes him feel more embedded in a creative world. His interest is focused on the relationship between the human being and his environment, as well as on the reflection on the nature of the image and visual perception.

 

To make the work owe only itself to itself is an old ideal of modern art: to cut the ties that bind it to natural reality and let it stand, all contained within its pure limits. To take up this venerable pretension without falling into abstraction and, moreover, to do it from the photographic medium seems almost impossible. But Patrik Grijalvo has found a way to shore up the autonomy of his images, weakening their link with the real referent -without losing it- and vindicating their condition as objects. In his hands they become sculptures: pieces of a delicate and subtle volume, achieved by a serene composition of planes. The result, far from being capricious or redundant, transmits a harmonious sensation of necessity. The artist does not impose on the images any three-dimensional form, at his whim, but builds it from the attributes of the photographic surface. One of the peculiarities of photography is the focus, which makes it necessary to discriminate areas of variable sharpness and, therefore, to mark the various planes of depth.