ANTONIO MENCHEN’S PHOTOGRAPHY AT MARTA CERVERA GALLERY

By providing form and playing with light and darkness, Menchen's poetics establish a speed that is its own. Even so, in his imaginary one can find infinite imaginaries, anonymous or not, that build from a photographic history. Living objects, or their traces and reflections, star in the portraits that can be found in the Marta Cervera gallery. Monochromatic predominates in them and the question of representation stands out, thus formulating a fiction that questions itself.

In his work, Antonio Menchen employs images not with the aim of telling stories but rather as a way of exploring new uses. In his investigations the image is conceived as a body-machine, a tool or a lever able to set in motion any type of relations. Understanding them as active organisms, they conform a platform for the investigation of the relations between editing, representation and construction. Under these parameters he builds pieces of a mixed nature where cinematography and its techniques of representation occupy an important place. A deconstructive use of the image allows him to assemble and disassemble protocols of representation, and at the same time to analyze the construction and reconfiguration of every fiction.

Antonio Menchen (Toledo, 1983), lives and works in Madrid. He finished his BFA in Madrid in 2007 continuing his academic education at the film department from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 2012 and receiving his MFA at Goldsmiths College in London in 2014.

He recently had a solo exhibition at Luis Adelantado Gallery in Valencia in 2021 titled El ojo es el primer círculo, and earlier Negro fondo ultraterreno at Bulegoa z/b in Bilbao in 2019. His work has been featured at Zerbait gertatzeko derrigorrezko desbideratzea (Artium, Vitoria–Gasteiz 2020); En tanto hay tacto (Sant Andreu Contemporani, Barcelona 2019), Mitos del futuro próximo (TEA, Tenerife 2019), Barru, barren, barrene (Harriak-EREMUAK, Arriarán y Güeñes 2019), Recorda el foc d´agost (Fabra i Coats, Barcelona 2019); Distancias elásticas (Centro Párraga, Murcia 2019); Querer parecer noche (CA2M, Móstoles, 2018); 10 VC (The Showroom, London, 2015); Rundgang (Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien, Vienna, 2012) and Sala de lectura (Espacio F, Madrid, 2005).