Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés

Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés - GUIA (Japan)

Technique: Direct digital printing with UV inks on dibond

Artist Biography: Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés was born in Madrid in 1973. He holds a degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and is a self-taught artist. "Sánchez-Montañés' photography draws from many sources and is closely linked to the landscape and architectural photography of the time. In that sense of the end of the century that is amazed by those places without any grandeur, neither ruin nor palace, landscapes that never before would have enjoyed the contemplation of an artist. Because photography ennobles the vulgar, the everyday, that which would never have left the palette of a painter. Because we are at the end of the world, of a world that we thought we knew and that now runs out in front of us, with that greatness that announces death. Anodyne places, only rescued by the photographer's gaze, it is that gaze that gives meaning to the images, which, although they are formed in series, a priori, all belong to the same family that grows in an organized disorder. Far away are his portraits and any sign of documentary, press photo, travel photo, and although nothing of what we see would be possible without the hand of man, the reality is that in these images life is stopped, there are no people, it is as if the world had become an uninhabited landscape, empty, in which only nostalgia remains. These landscapes bring us back to a forgotten origin, and make us feel a certain sense of mourning for the world that was, that passed. We attend somehow in these photographs to the idea of what was, to an irreversible past. It is the melancholy of the end of an era. Other names of artists, photographers, from different places, different cultures, look into the same existential void. Although they do not know each other, they are part of the same army of seekers of something they will never find by their very nature, because they are looking for something that is no longer there, they are peering into the hole left by every displaced body, into the black hole of absence". De la soledad (fragment). Rosa Olivares.