GALAPAGOS SURREAL – Katara Cultural Center

In the old sublime aesthetic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists showed the natural world as threatening and almost overwhelming. In these roots, photographer Fernando Espinosa Chauvín depicted the Galapágos Islands in a series of expedition to the place. Surreal and confronting, the fury and raw majesty of nature of the Galápagos, in its various aspects, provides for a creative reading.

Chauvín transformed the unfamiliar environs in an attractive subject, creating images of great power and haunting beauty. Photographic works are also elegant, minimalistic visions showing the artist’s great sensitivity to the form and movement of the islands and an almost mystical approach to the subject: the sea appears mirage like; the wildlife, tantalising; the rocks, unattainable. It is a nostalgic and romanticised view of life and the landscape itself. To engage the viewer to his photographs, Chauvín makes use of technology. In so doing, he creates a different structure of imagery unveiling dense patterns of vegetation and landscape, seamless integration that would be invisible to the naked eye. Reduced to montage, these patterns and textures, serve to denote Chauvín’s spiritual and emotional engagement with the natural world and his ability to record, connect and reveal.

Clay D’Paula