José Val del Omar

José Val del Omar - Óptica Biónica

Technique: Slide projector. Bionic optics with chromatic and liquid adapters.

Artist Biography:

 

1 slide: 10.000 EUR 2 slides: 15.000 EUR 3 slides: 18.000 EUR Born in Granada in 1904, José Val del Omar, despite having lived there only in his youth, always maintained a profoundly Granada feeling, recurrently present in his work. From a well-to-do family, he discovered cinema in its beginnings, during a stay in Paris at the age of 17. Upon his return, he shot several films as an amateur and a feature film that he himself destroyed. After a voluntary retreat in Las Alpujarras, his mystical and orientalist vocation was revealed, which together with his passion for technique, would give rise to Mecamística, a personal philosophy that would define him as an artist. In 1928 he conceived and developed several technical inventions, such as the "variable angle lens" (known today as zoom), the "concave screen", the "apanoramic image" and the "tactile illumination", which, at the age of 25, he exhibited in the magazine "La Pantalla" in Madrid. In the 1930s, during the Second Republic, he joined Luis Cernuda, Carmen Conde, Rafael Dieste, Ramón Gaya, Maria Zambrano and other intellectuals and artists in the Pedagogical Missions, whose objective was to bring culture to the most remote and humble people and villages of Spain. Val del Omar made about 40 documentaries in the Missions (disappeared and still untraceable) and about 9000 photographs of great technical and aesthetic value. It was at that time when Val del Omar was consolidated not only as a documentarist and photographer, but also as a man-orchestra in the Missions and the People's Museum. In 1934-35 he shot in Cartagena, Lorca and Murcia the ethnographic documentary Fiestas Cristianas/Fiestas Profanas in which he tested the "variable angle lens". In 1935, he shoots in two days Vibración de Granada, dedicated to his hometown. In 1973, his daughter María José and his son-in-law Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga gave him what would be his last laboratory. Freed from administrative obligations and with his own space and means to develop his techniques, he put into practice what would be the most visionary of his creations, the PICTO LUMINICA AUDIO TACTIL. In this last stage, he experimented with laser and Bionic Optics, which he had presented at the UNIATEC congress in Moscow in 1976. With this technique, Val del Omar makes the viewer move around the images distorting them optically. He also creates the Plat Tetrascope - a projection technique between the still and the sequential image - generating a universe of images and sounds, manipulating all of this through the "Truca Table", also created by him. The result is hundreds of diakinas and tetrakinas, recordings of "beaten" sounds, super 8 films, and among others, the filigree of Variations on a Pomegranate. Most of his collages as well as many of his techno-poetic writings, in which the keys to his mechamistic thought are captured, also correspond to this period. Determined to return to the cinema to collect in a final work, Ojala, the vortex of his Elemental Triptych of Spain, he was surprised by death as a result of a traffic accident in August 1982. Since then, Val del Omar has been living a growing Endlessness, just as his films and the works of an artist without end come to an end. Exhibited in: "From Gutenberg to Faraday", 2018, Galería Max Estrella, Madrid. Armory Show, 2019. "Cinema of Sensations: The Never Ending Screen of Val del Omar," 2023, MoMI, New York.