Asphalts. 5th Avenue, New York - Limited Edition of 3 Photograph by Manuel Gamonal

Photography: Black & White, Color, Digital on Paper.

Giclée print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag 308 gr paper

42 x 31 cm, excluding frame

Exhibition history:
2017. Manuel Gamonal "El primer final / The first ending". Curator: Kasia Nagórska. Collblanc Espai d'Art. Castellón, Spain

An intermediate space. Neither here nor there. Belonging to everybody and to nobody. A forgotten, opaque and shady space. The street is a place that is no longer private but that is still embedded in the security of the domesticated, the known. A place of transit that is not meant to look or to be seen. Both a physical space and an abstract idea. It is in this space - in the cracks, in the fissures, in the margins of the visible - where the “The first ending project” is conceptually located.

Manuel Gamonal’s work puts to the test the notions of the monumental and intimate space, of gravity and lightness, order and chaos. Drawing from a formal territory already developed in previous projects, he manipulates the matter, configuring and reconfiguring the forms in a very personal language based on line, repetition and serialization.

Giorgio Morandi used to say that nothing can become more abstract and more unreal than what we see. And what we see here are intimate scenarios composed of the disposable, the plain and the austere. If there is a clear protagonist here, it is the blackness. On black backgrounds, in the darkness, in the nocturnal silence, everyday anonymous objects come to life, charged with cadence and spirituality. They become still lives, improvised tableaus or anonymous funeral portraits. Bathed in a zurbaranian darkness, the found pieces find their metaphysical root. The waste that is not intended to be seen takes on organic and fetishistic notes through a voyeur’s eye. Out of context, they become set designs, afterimages, finally abstract compositions, blurring the edges between object and form. The ruins are transformed into artificial signs, translated into geometries. Geometries that in their purest form would allude to ideas of order and control, but here they get fragmented, fractured or combined, reflecting the conflict, the uncertainty, the unrest of this moment in time.