Paolo Gasparini - Field of Images

venue: Photography Center

Paolo Gasparini
Field of Images
September 30, 2021–January 16, 2022

Fundación MAPFRE is presenting the first retrospective in Spain on the photographer Paolo Gasparini (born Goritzia, Italy, 1934). Produced by the Fundación and curated by María Wills Londoño, Director of Banco de la República’s Arts Unit and Other Collections, the exhibition features more than 300 photographs from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections.

Paolo Gasparini: Field of Images offers a complete survey of the six decades of the artist’s career, focusing on both his photographs and on another of his principal means of artistic expression, the photobook. Together they present a journey through different cities in a process of transformation: Caracas, Havana, São Paolo and Mexico City, and one that also has resonances of Munich, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid and London.

Gasparini’s work constitutes a journey which spans two opposing worlds but ones that have been historically interdependent. By means of his photography he aims to eliminate the ethnocentric vision from which Latin America has taken shape either through or in opposition to Europe and the United States. His works allow for an understanding not just of the differences between Europe and Latin America but also the diversity within the latter, from Mexico to south of the Andes. As the exhibition’s curator 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 as a result of World War II; of Cubans to Spain and the United States; of 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.”

Paolo Gasparini is the photographer who has best portrayed the cultural tensions and contradictions of the South American continent. His images convey the harsh social reality faced by a region of undoubted cultural authenticity and one in which the past and local tradition establish a dialogue with a heavy-handed, imposed modernity. Gasparini is engaged in the creation of a body of work with a unique visual language which always seems to express a critique of consumer society while revealing a degree of obsession with the way in which marketing and advertising seduce us. His images are real and reflect the chaos of contemporary life: advertising hoardings, reflections in shop windows, workers finishing their day, homeless people, passers-by, tower blocks, poor houses, political slogans and the harsh lives of the Andean peasants, all treated with the maximum respect and dignity, finding beauty in that quotidian chaos and showing its vitality.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with reproductions of all the works on display. 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, holder of the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. Following its showing in Barcelona, the exhibition will travel to Fundación MAPFRE’s Sala Recoletos in Madrid in the summer of 2022.