The goal when developing this novel was to describe our prodigious, magical, and strange reality through eyes unaccustomed, like ours, to seeing it so ordinary amidst the pillars of subsistence, social relations, and feelings. There weren’t many options, and the first-person perspective offered by a machine was chosen; although the machine is a human product and possesses something of its creator, something that can amount to much. Ridding the character of humanity became the main challenge of this work, which required an arduous and almost mystical process of introspection that began with the analysis of everyday affairs and ended with that of personal ones, at the very edge of the abyss of the human condition, from where the disturbing conclusion was glimpsed that, in some way, we too are Machines.
Sometimes animals look at the camera, they look at me, I don’t know if with indifference, curiosity… disgust, I don’t know if they ask me what we are doing to them, to the planet. They ask you the same question too
no bety, no desire to write (just an update of the script for the feature film El Señor de Ébano in the shortest and most unlivable days of winter), no… only photography remains
january
the first picture of the year, the first day of the year, and of course, the boss (yes, I'm a sucker) 024_093
time, space, color … a path from the figurative to the foundations of reality: the abstract. A single 2-second exposure photograph, one to focus and one to paint.
If a global catastrophe happened today we could not survive a long period without sunlight, neither a generalized glaciation or unexpected star emissions… The fact that a simple animal species like ours can overcome the adversity that can be exposed by an entire planet or a whole solar system or a whole galaxy would require a precise conjunction of efforts. And humanity, in all its meanings, is unequivocally compartmentalized by useless boundaries erected with a blind utilitarianism. One planet, One State; a heart, millions of simultaneous beats, as told in The black sun, or we will end up becoming more of a cosmic insignificance.
The image with its immediacy and its realism allows us to give real meaning to all the “things”. The only pre-existence of the reality gives to the artists the possibility to reproduce it as much as to transform it and, even, deform it. The spectator is placed before that baroque idea about the doubt that man has when it is about to confront with the represented objects, as in Etienne Pascal pointed in his essay pour Les Coniques, where the same reality can generate different perspectives according to the visual system used or, getting a bit further, where the images work, following the ANALOGON of Sartre, over the environment that the image itself discovers and organizes in a sensitive way not being able to tell the difference between the material and the intentions. This argument, understood by Juan Manuel Perez Rayego makes his works to let us getting lost in that labyrithm of the eye-sight to unveil part of the features of a reality. And for that he masterfully modulates the dialectic of the Known and the unrecognizable or of the invisible and what can be seen ( visible). And even connect art and science, technology and humanism to save the barriers that could appear at the time of combining them and give light to the controversy that the contemporary world has created around these concepts. Javier Cano Ramos, text for the exhibition of Natures in Casa de la Cultura, Don Benito, Badajoz. 2013
