Alejandro Guijarro 

Chopped Tomatoes  

Chopped Tomatoes

About the artist

There is a mistiness that makes you loose your bearings, clouding the represented object more than revealing it, toying with the viewer’s perceptions in sometimes deeply confusing ways: is the image surfacing or disappearing before our very eyes? Alejandro Guijarro explores this area of ​​uncertainty and invites us to make our way through the thick fog, penetrate the very essence of photography and question the notions of reality and truth we usually take for granted.

Interview

The scene is kept in a state somewhere between appearance and disappearance. Defined depth of field and sharpness – essentially, the depiction of a specific moment - no longer exist in your pictures. Are you questioning the very fundamentals of the photographic image?
What I am questioning is the generalized claim that photography is factual truth. My work deals with the idea that initially “reality” is neither graspable nor comprehensible, but constitutes a bizarre passage of non-knowledge to knowledge, a paradoxical coexistence of sense and non-sense. My work functions as a renegotiation of this paradox. The incomplete images test the beholder, challenging him to grasp the physical world he inhabits.

The two pictures selected here feature a couple in bed, and a woman chopping tomatoes on a table. Why did you choose to depict mundane scenes of the everyday life?
The idea is to transform the preconceived idea of everyday life by de-contextualizing its banal and trivial dimension - confronting the familiar with the unknown of the surrounding void. My aim is to establish a fictional space, to create an uncomfortable tension - a sense of awkwardness that interrogates what is otherwise taken for granted.

Trying to look harder and longer does not bring a deeper understanding, but only a gaze. Are the image’s reluctance to reveal more, the persistent mystery and tension, an image of the nature of a photograph - a total enigma, wrapped in an illusion of verisimilitude?
My work dwells on what the perceptual limits of photography are; my images cross a threshold where the verisimilitude of the medium is denied by the whiteness. Apparent opaque whites veil figure and ground. These whites however are a result of physical interventions (the use of a fog machine), or the excess of light (over-exposure) - the combination of both, paradoxically, produces the apparent presence of a sort of uncanny “lightness” and absence of information. This whiteness can be considered a visual motif, masking and restricting the possibility of a clear interpretation of the image - the photographic image moves towards non-indexical media producing a trompe-l’oeil effect nevertheless achieved by a photographic process. Today’s digital era has forced us to completely rethink the notion of photography as synonymous with reality and engage with the medium on another level.

Limited edition, numbered and signed. 

Selected shows and awards

Stitch, Art for the Earth, The Diary Gallery, London, 2011

Unpublished, 1st December, Le Dictateur Gallery, Milan, 2011

Broad Daylight, Fumi Gallery, London, 2011

Exploration and Intervention, New Landscape Photography, George & Jørgen Fine Art, London, 2011

The Uneasy Landscape, Fold Gallery, London, 2010

London Loves, Vitrine Gallery, London, 2010

Selected publications

Broad Daylight, Artist's Book, 2010
Picking Up, Bouncing Back, Alexander Garcia Duttmann & Jean-Luc Nancy RCA Photography, Catalogue, 
2010 

Christie's Paris, Arsep-Christie's catalogue
, 2009
ITS SIX (International Talent Support), catalogue, 2007

Details

& order

Alejandro Guijarro 
Chopped Tomatoes

2010

Technical information

Digital Lambda c-print on satin paper - limited edition, numbered and signed certificate.

Dimensions

30 x 36,5 cm, Edition of 100 200.00 €




By the same artist

Alejandro Guijarro


By the same curator