Vanitas

Castro Prieto, one of the best representatives of the generation of Spanish photographers that emerged in the 1980s, has rescued from among his photographs a repertoire of images belonging to different series such as Strangers, Imaginary Landscapes and Cespedosa. And as if it were a pack of cards, he has spread them around the walls of the gallery to compose Vanitas, a cabinet of mysterious arcana behind which the certainty of death and the fragility of life are intuited, always with a certain touch of irony and humour with which he seems to want to strip such abysmal matters of their transcendence. His work travels through the personal and family spaces of his childhood with an autobiographical gaze with which he explores the latent traces of memory and underlines the dreamlike and literary aspects of everyday life. In his alchemist vocation, Castro Prieto has turned the confinement forced by the pandemic into an opportunity to explore the possibilities of gold in the printing of his works. In black and white, applying layers and layers of silver gelatine on glass and, behind them, 24-carat gold. And in colour, with mineral inks on acetate. The use of the golden metal has allowed him to highlight the symbolic and allegorical value of these vanitas of ravings and fleeting lights populated by strange and fascinating characters. The result is a visual poem and a technical display by this great photographer and darkroom virtuoso.