The works by Miguel Ángel Tornero that we now present in Pavesas de aquello, which is his third solo exhibition in our space in Santander, are part of a personal creative process in which he has been immersed for several years and which he showed in the inaugural exhibition of our Madrid project in February 2020. As for the contents, they are centred on a profound and emotional reflection in which he confronts his native landscape of Jaen, and formally they respond to a very personal research on the way of approaching the practices derived from photography and collage.
In the series La noche en balde, from 2017, Tornero represented, fragmented and with aggressive flashes, wasteland and wild rural territories of thistles and pitas. They were photographic collages made with vehement cut-outs and organic compositions. In his next work Quemar ramón (2020) he talked about the cultivated land and the different phases of its care, specifically the moment of pruning the olive tree and burning its remains after harvesting the olives, moving from photography to collage made with painted cardboard. Now, in Pavesas de aquello, he stylistically distils this last stage and relates it to the initial one, displaying a sort of synthesis of his findings.
On the one hand, we will find photographic collages in which the olive tree and its voluptuousness are the main theme, new pieces of collage on cardboard, as well as a series of collages on paper, where the oil on the paper and the remains of materials left over during the work process dialogue organically.
Completing the exhibition and confronting the way of approaching a landscape that is not so close, a video is also displayed. This video was made for the exhibition Percorrer o Tempo on the Camino de Santiago. Yo no sé lo que busco eternamente, whose title alludes to a poem by Rosalía de Castro, is an audiovisual drift along the Silver Route (Ruta de la plata) of the Camino de Santiago. It was made in an unprecedented situation, in the middle of the pandemic, in which it was not possible to find any pilgrims at all or visit the significant places on the Camino. But this scenario without actors – if only some people in their daily lives – was also an opportunity to encounter the landscape in a rawer way, the sounds of nature, the beasts of the road… and, in the relationship with these elements, perhaps with ourselves.
If “ramón” are the remains of dry leaves and old branches that have to be collected from the ground and eliminated after the olive harvest, “pavesas” refer to those small particles that are released from the burning of all these remains and flutter in flames until they disappear as ashes. There is something metaphorical in these concepts that inevitably links with the period of exception that we have gone through and that, in some way, remains in us and must heal. We could say that Pavesas de aquello continues to reflect on the power of regeneration and the difficulty and necessity of knowing how to get rid of what the fire turned into ashes.
PAVESAS DE AQUELLO
15th June – 6th August, 2022
Miguel Ángel Tornero
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday,
10.30AM – 1.30PM
6 – 9PM