Mi madre, 1953

Marina Salazar de Borja
Abril 23, 1922-Noviembre 25, 2007

Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, Londres

Estudio para retrato del Papa Inocencio X 1953 (After Velázquez)


Es fácil adjudicar a Francis Bacon varias etiquetas. Estas hablan en su mayoría del horror, de la violencia que conduce al espasmo en la evisceración de seres inconclusos pero intuidos. Hay mucho de asalto visual en sus cuadros, de emboscada naranja, carmesí y verde intenso en su pintura, que nos compele en primera instancia a rechazarlas. Pero, más poderoso que el rechazo hay de por medio un descubrimiento de lo insondable a simple vista, que hace imposible no mirarlas. Hay que mirar a Bacon para poder sentir el poderío implacable de su puñal resplandeciente de colores. Hay que acercarse temerosamente a su hoguera, a riesgo y con el propósito esencial de sentir el fuego. Porque lo que hay en Bacon es el color y más que el color el sentimiento de percibir los tintes del misterio. Los cuadros que chorrean blancos como húmeros gelatinosos; los verdes que convierten a un perro común en un espanto; los grises que hablan del silencio en los más que silenciosos espacios de la tristeza y la soledad contemporánea.
Es muy fácil decir que Bacon es un artista maldito. Mucho más difícil es pensar que es un ángel dedicado a reivindicar el martirio de los inocentes.
Manteniendo los necesarios límites y guardadas las evidentes proporciones, pienso que hay mucho en su pintura que nos remite a aquellos minúsculos grabados de Goya -Los Desastres de la Guerra- denuncia irrefutable de la inhumanidad del ser humano y aquella conducta proclive al desmembramiento y la mutilación de sus congéneres, como herramienta de ejercicio del poder. De igual forma encuentro una relación no muy tenue entre ambos y el trabajo artístico del fotógrafo americano Joel-Peter Witkin, quien ha logrado instaurar su arte a partir de una asombrosa visión apocalíptica del hombre contemporáneo.
Bacon sobrepasa todas las denominaciones que se le puedan endilgar. No es abstracto, ni surrealista, ni naturalista. Ni mucho menos impresionista: es simplemente impresionante. Es quizá el pintor que más desafía el concepto recóndito de la alucinación; de los sueños prohibidos que nacen en el sótano de los sentidos y sobreviven a los grandes incendios de la realidad.
Esa misma realidad que nos lleva a abrir bien los ojos porque lo que tenemos frente a nuestra vapuleada pupila es ni más ni menos que la apoteosis de la pintura. En el Siglo XXI y muchos por venir.


La exhibición retrospectiva de la pintura de Francis Bacon, en la Galería Tate Britain, estará abierta hasta el 4 de enero de 2009



















Francis Bacon, retratado por Richard Avedon, Paris 1979

The women in my life

If there is a single anything I owe photography it must be its capacity to make me turn back the clock and revisit some of the memories that would be otherwise lost forever. My mother, gone from this world a year ago this November, lives unchanged in this portrait taken with her granddaughter who is already 27 years of age, but who like her grandma will never grow old and will always look an angelical eight year old as she was, when this portrait was taken.
This is my mother and my older daughter, Sahara, during the summer of 1989.

Ecuador Summer of 2000

There is a mask which acts as an omnipresent façade that will always stand between any photographic transaction we may conduct when dealing with our sitters, while travelling through the highlands of Ecuador and photographing some of its many characters in towns, plazas and market places.
It is a long process, which we might start by calling it Picturesque, for lack of a more adept name; since that is, in essence, the defining factor of most portraits taken when going abroad. In trying to avoid the picturesque I begin by wiping off the smiles from the faces in my subjects.
The faces are their only masks. And they conceal nothing. I feel they hide nothing because they do not have to pretend to show other than what they are, hence the ever-present sad countenance in many of my subjects portrayed here.
Nothing can be gained by hiding what they are. The only true face is the stoic sculpture chiselled out on their skin. These faces say nothing and expect nothing, save a few worn-out coins and sometimes nothing.

It started in the summer of 2000 in Quito, followed by stops in Baños, Riobamba and ended in Cuenca, in the Southern part of that beautiful country.
These are faces we have to discover by ourselves. Not only their physical make-up, there is a lot to answer to their silence since we are the visitors, we live abroad, we have a lot more in our pockets. We have to make head or tails of their presence in front of the camera and start by trying a lot harder to understand, first the defiant stance that make some of them challenge our complacency and then our own role on this equation of North vs South.
The portrait photographer who travels to Ecuador to trap the picturesque would do a lot better by staying home reading travel catalogues. For if one is to go to a place such as this Andean region, one had better be ready to encounter challenges not found in the glossy pages of any magazine and accept that we are mere intruders.
The camera sometimes sees what we want to see ourselves. It is better to let it be independent of our prejudices and desires for that way a natural order of things will come into being a lot easier.

The Market in Cuenca, Ecuador, 1979

Before I ever thought of taking photographs in market places in Colombia I had been three times to Ecuador and in those occasions I was mesmerized by the rich variety of visuals that one can encounter in such places.

More than “encounter” I feel I should call them visual assaults, such is the variety and the unexpected richness of what the traveller can find in that Andean country.
It is impossible not to be overwhelmed by what you see. A million flowers of infinite variation of tones, and an endless array of fruits of amazing colours.

And there is, of course, its people.

If portraiture is what interests you in photography then Ecuador is a tremendous source of material to photograph. I always found the markets the most interesting of all places to visit when I had been travelling through that wonderful country.
The mountains with its vast expanse of green fading into the horizon and the faces of its people have proved irresistible. Any time you stopped anywhere along the road you were surrounded by faces, young and old.

I remember a time in which people used to crowd around you wanting to know where you were coming from and how were things “out there”, meaning abroad or wherever it was you lived. The first time I visited in 1979 I walked around fascinated by the absolute tranquillity of those places, people went about their business without questioning your presence.
This series of images I have recently found hidden in an old envelope and I can vaguely remember printing them sometime in the early eighties in Toronto. They portray the sellers and buyers going about their business with a couple of extra images out of the ordinary. One shows a heavily handicapped man dragging himself through the market asking for alms and the other shows an old man who carries a crucifix from stall to stall collecting money from the sellers as he makes his rounds.
This is a very old tradition in South America and people, more so the poorest, give generously always hoping that divine intercession will help them better their lot.

Tumba de Cortázar - Cementerio de Montparnasse

Hace ya un par de veranos decidí visitar por primera vez la tumba de quien ha sido en mi vida un faro de inextinguible luz, Julio Cortázar.

De pie frente a la blanca piedra debajo de la cual reposa el gran escritor argentino vinieron a mi mente estas palabras escritas desde hacía ya varios años y que finalmente parecían venir al caso.



HORACIO OLIVEIRA PIENSA EN LA MAGA

                                                                              A La Petite, París 1988

Sé que trajinas la noche 

Tratando de hallar

En el fatigado fulgor de las hogueras 

La clave cifrada

Que te ha de liberar de tus fantasmas

Sé también que la aurora 

Moja tus pestañas

De una fina llovizna cenicienta

Que las blandas agujas del hastío te obligan

A bordar el sueño de un leopardo

Intuyo tu silueta vagando en su desvelo

Hacia el refugio insomne de los puentes

Como si buscando 

En el oculto espejo del río

Pudieras hallar tu rostro ingenuo 

De hechizada fiera

No habrá tregua

Ni alivio a tu tormento

En el exiguo palpitar del alba

Mientras la lengua susurrante 

Del rocío te repita al oído 

El nombre escalofriante del olvido.

                                                                                     

                                                                                   CALI, COL - JUNIO 20, 2000

Notes On a Photographic Project - Cali, Col 1995

In 1995 after many years abroad I returned to Cali, Colombia, from San Francisco, California.
Simultaneous with my return I decided to make a photographic documentary based on portraits of many of the characters that gather every Sunday afternoon in a large park south of the city, in the neighbourhood where I spent my childhood and adolescence.
It is an open space where people go looking for a bit of relaxation, some social interaction and any kind of free entertainment they can get before returning to their homes in the late evening.






































It is by any standards a Sunday afternoon for working-class people and for all intents and purposes many of the those who go there have something on their minds. There are plenty of men and women looking for each other as they perambulate without agenda throughout the afternoon. Many of them are domestic service maids who come from the better off parts of town mingling with brick layers, soldiers on leave, fortune tellers, ice cream vendors, undercover cops and a truly astonishing variety of con men and women ready to make a quick buck off the back of anyone not cautious enough who get caught on their web.






































My main purpose, photographically speaking, was to concentrate on the ambulatory vendors, street sellers of every kind of merchandise as they make their way through the crowds hawking their wares. The park is always teeming with these. Many are children and there are plenty of old men and old women who walk listlessly carrying big baskets with them, or dragging around large plastic bags brimming with every conceivable thing as they try to make the best of a large crowd in the park.
Everyone tries to make a living and everyone has the mark of urgency and much despair etched on their faces. It is a hard way to bring home the bacon.






































Initially I became acquainted with the park’s photographers since many of them, and there are many, are the eyes of the place, literally speaking. I was able to exchange information with them, share a few beers and get a feel for the space. I asked about the security risks involved in bringing an expensive camera into public view and so forth. Before long we were colleagues speaking the same language and I felt safe surrounded by them.
After a few weeks I brought my equipment and also an old black cloth I inherited from a theatre group. That cloth became my working space, my background which I hung from two trees with a rope, a wonderful working space where I asked people to enter and with which I managed to get my portraits done.
I spent nearly three months, working the cloth and the crowds every Sunday afternoon and did not call off my project until after I felt I had got what I needed.
The park photographers did not feel any animosity towards me because my project was a private artistic enterprise without any monetary exchange taking place.






































I felt that I was continuing a long tradition where photographers for many generations before me had spent time photographing common people for reasons that go from the humanistic to the curious.
I was merely interested on their stories and also to get to know some of the people from my old country from which I had been estranged for so long. It was a worthwhile project and now, thirteen years later sitting in my studio in England, I can still recall their voices and the sad countenance of their faces. Bless them all.