Jon Gorospe

Jon Gorospe - From Magnete: Diptych

Artist Biography: Jon Gorospe, Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain, 1986). Graduated from the EASD of the Basque Country and the Faculty of Arts of Vilnius (Lithuania). He completed his training with different authors from the world of photography, auteur cinema and visual arts. His work has been recognized by numerous public and private institutions, such as the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum (USA), the Sasakawa Foundation (Japan-Scandinavia) or Futures Photography (Creative Europe Programme). He has exhibited his work in different countries such as: Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, England, Slovakia, Norway, Russia or Singapore. An important part of his work focuses on new approaches to the idea of anthropized landscape, developing different bodies of work such as Polished Cities (2018-in process), Metropolis (2018-2019) or Environments (2014-2016). Gorospe combines his work as an artistic creator with the work of study and understanding of the image from a theoretical point of view, developing cultural management and curatorial work." Member of Forbundet Frie Fotografer

 

In De Magnete, Jon Gorospe explores the symbolic and transcendental tradition of landscape to bring it up to date and to speak from that angle. Not only is landscape present in his images as a subject, but also - and above all - as an embracing space that refers constantly to vastness: the vastness of what is huge and the vastness of our inner self. The inner reality that Gorospe aims at and which he unfolds in this series is at once enigmatic and tumultuous. He has used a particular idea of the sacred on more than one occasion in order to refer to it, this being the assembly of beauty and terror (Rilke) or of beauty and its revelations (the epiphanies it provokes). In order to do this, Gorospe turns to a series of black and white landscapes alternating several color photographs in which the only thing we can distinguish are transitions between colors. These gradients have a twofold function. On one hand, just like a map's legend, they are the key to the series: they provide us with the coordinates that guide its interpretation. On the other hand, they also represent something ethereal and formless, a beyond, a behind. Another element with a strategic role is present in the landscape images: scale, or rather the absence of it, also understood as its dissolution from the perspective of fractal geometry. That which is big and that which is small are intertwined and indistinct but equally vertigi- nous, equally out of reach.