FIELD OF IMAGES BY PAOLO GASPARINI

Paolo Gasparini (born in Goritzia, Italy, 1934) is the photographer who has best portrayed the cultural tensions and contradictions of the South American continent and its relations with Europe and the United States. His images convey the harsh social reality faced by a region of undoubted cultural authenticity and in which the past and local tradition dialogue with a heavy-handed and imposed modernity. Gasparini is committed to creating a body of work with a unique visual language that always expresses a critique of consumer society while revealing a degree of obsession with the way marketing and advertising seduce us. His commitment to the political and social movements that were having an impact in Latin America meant that, beyond portraying the events that were taking place, he aligned himself with the discourse of the left-wing intelligentsia that demanded a type of social art at that time. who sought to do justice.

Gasparini's perspective makes it possible to understand not only the differences between Europe and South America, but also the diversity within the latter, from Mexico to the southern Andes. As the curator of the exhibition María Wills has observed: “Gasparini's photographs reflect on the effects of decades of political migrations in the 20th and 21st centuries: migrations of Europeans to the Americas in the wake of World War II; from Cubans to Spain and the United States; from Ecuadorians to Spain; and, more recently, the massive exodus of Venezuelans to Colombia. Generation after generation marked by voluntary and forced exiles inevitably make us reflect on the ambivalence of identity”. Gasparini's approach to visual culture arises from movement, since he produces his images while walking and it is through this action that the aesthetics of his work are revealed, influenced by the tragedy of the city and the chaos of contemporary life: billboards, reflections in shop windows, workers finishing their shift, homeless people, passers-by, block towers, poor houses, political slogans and the hard life of Andean peasants.

Furthermore, Gasparini tends to fragment the temporal sense of his series, revisiting images he has produced in the past together with more recent ones. This is what he means by il senno di poi [retrospective understanding]: "[...] I associated images, linking them with different themes, places and dates, trying to organize a new discourse that, through the architecture of the city and some aspects of their daily life suggest a reinterpretation of Caracas in its past and future, representing social, political and cultural contradictions.” His usual way of composing images through juxtapositions expresses the result of a society marked by contrasts.

The exhibition is divided into 16 sections that present some of the artist's most important projects carried out over more than six decades of work. He offers a particular focus on photobooks, which Gasparini considers a form of expression of equal importance to his photographs. It also includes essays by the curator María Wills Londoño, the photography historian Horacio Fernández, the art historian and visual cultural researcher Sagrario Berti, the writer and journalist Juan Villoro and Antonio Muñoz Molina, Prince of Asturias Award for Literature.