Jorge Fuembuena

Jorge Fuembuena - The end of the cathedrals

Technique: Chromogenic printing mounted on diasec

Artist Biography: Artist scholar at La Casa de Velázquez (Acadèmie de France à Madrid). He teaches photography at the Escuela Sur (founded by La Fábrica and the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid), at the International Master Photoespaña (PIC.A) and at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) and has given numerous Masterclasses at Universities such as Nebrija, Carlos III, TAI or Arte10. He has been invited as a speaker at the Photography Seminar in Albarracín or at the Photography Meetings in Gijón.

 

The title announces it unambiguously. And from that moment on, in this series of photographs what could be the testimony of beauty is nothing more than its testament; and the sublime, that emotional overflow that arises from our contemplative experience before a landscape, embarks us on an inexorable drift towards melancholy. Jorge Fuembuena has chosen a territory bordering on the mythical, that of the Jakobshavn glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq), to undertake an endeavor of romantic resonances: the precise tracking and recording of the movements of this enormous surface that wanders wandering through the northern hemisphere, wrapped in a light that ignores the chronology of day and night. An ancestral ice mass that is, simultaneously, a primitive place and an uncertain territory, where the mutant morphology of its landscape is governed by a randomness whose parameters nobody knows, because nobody has described them. The glacier is a space that, represented in images, puts in crisis the perception we have of its scale. In its ice there are no recognizable elements that give us a clue about its dimensions; and without that extra information our vision can only venture conjectures about what looks like an aerial view, but which may be a set of small icy fragments. These photographs do not provide certainties, here the only certainty is the imminence of its disappearance. To know this territory, to embrace it, is a vain aspiration, because not only its forms are ephemeral, but also its location. The topographic annotations latitude, altitude, longitude, etc.- illustrate a will that has lost the battle before starting it. Accepting the impossibility of mapping what has no borders and yet insisting on this obsession is a way of coming to terms with our imperfection, of understanding that we are sailing at sea, incapable of governing the present, let alone the future. Perhaps this illogical enterprise is only the denotation of the dualities -life and death, order and chaos, reality and fiction- that coexist in that glacier that Fuembuena has turned into a metaphorical space: a blank canvas on which to write his relationship with nature. And to semantically expand these reflections, he uses color and light that invite us to emotionally experience the landscape. We are what we see, North American landscape artists -painters and photographers- must have thought in the 19th century when faced with the spectacular natural spaces: virgin and majestic. Through them they could symbolize the land that God had reserved for his chosen people. The epic of the American pioneers used the landscape as a stage for the Protestant paradigm: Man as owner and lord of Nature. Some time later, the catalog of ruins that this arrogance has generated is in the substratum of Fuembuena's project. These silent photographs suggest those catastrophes and exhibit the author's position on ecology, but above all they aspire to demonstrate that if we are what we see, what we see should also be able to change the perception of what we are. Alejandro Castellote