Created in 1960 in Paris, on the initiative of Raymond Queneau, OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) set itself the task of discovering new potentialities of language and modernizing language through writing games. Born two years earlier, Chema Madoz could not have been part of the adventure. Situated on the borders of surrealism and the absurd, and using all the rhetorical procedures (from allegory to metonymy, via accumulation, hypallage, and concatenation), his photographic practice comes very close to it: diverting objects from their primary meaning, associating them with others through their figurative (or secondary) meaning to reveal their hidden meaning; his unusual marriages or diversions of objects staged before being photographed appear in effect as “ouvroirs” of images and potential meanings.
A sewing needle stuck in the grooves of a fingerprint, a curtain made of blond hair, a house of cards imprisoned in scaffolding, an ear adorned with a crown of thorns, an axe swaddled in bandages… The latest series of black and white photographs by the Spanish artist does not deny the legacy of the Count of Lautréamont and his famous verse-maximus from Les Chants de Maldoror: “Beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”
Chema Madoz
Galeria Elvira González
Hermnos Alvarez Quintero, 1
Madrid
Until 16 July
Stéphanie Dulout