In the famous photos taken by Maurice Jarnoux for Paris Match, André Malraux can be seen at his home in Boulogne sur Seine, surrounded by page-long illustrations strewn across the floor. In some cases the author seems lost in the images of his imaginary museum; in others she dances on it. The account is eloquent; It largely corresponds to Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the printed reproduction of works of art and also to John Berger’s more recent ideas about photography. In short, photography transforms what it touches into art, that is, it detaches the works from their original context – ideally sacred or religious, but can also be technical or topographical, as in the case of architecture – and leaves them a new sphere enters it: the art book, in which they become something else. They now appear on a homogeneous level, liberated from their function and determinations. They have attained their own finality. In turn, the meanings they served have disappeared and been erased.
This simultaneous profit and loss trade covers a current exhibition and a current book. Between 2017 and 2021 Juan Cuéllar and Roberto Mollá curated Painted Architectures, a selection of painters, many of whom were “neometaphysical” (Juan Manuel Bonet) or “post-conceptual” (Paco de la Torre) and traveled across Europe (Berlin, Warsaw, Prague , Bucharest, Evora…). Now the architecture, in this case the University of the four Valencian campuses, is once again the base for the new, no longer just pictorial, replicas gathered in La Nau under the title Campus.
“No one in Siete pasos later” (2022), video art installation by Teresa Tomás. At the La Nau Cultural Center in Valencia.
The faculties, residences or libraries designed for four decades by Moreno Barberá or Giorgio Grassi served the work of very painterly painters such as De la Torre himself or Elena Goñi or Joël Mestre, but also other animation artists (Teresa Tomás), interactive works ( Jorge Tarazona) or objects (Pamen Pereira or Señor Cifrián’s team). And the bottom line is that the starting point for everything was the images. The curators themselves say they are celebrating “a triadic ballet between painterly, photographic and cinematographic images”. The University of Valencia maintains an extensive photo collection on this subject and in 1998 commissioned other well-known artists, including the photographer-photographers Gabriele Basilico and Humberto Rivas, or the painters Ian Wallace and Per Kirkeby.
The color of the paintings is called “phármakon” in Greek, the same word used for drug, poison
As you can see, this area needs a lot of filing. The book by Iñaki Bergera – himself an architect and photographer, top expert and director of seminal projects like the one he completed in “Photography and Modern Architecture in Spain, 1925-1965” (ICO Foundation, 2014) – offers us photography and Architecture. The image of built space. And it helps us to ask: Do architectural photographs serve architecture, so to speak? Or, to paraphrase Malraux and Benjamin, is it destined to mutate autonomously in order to advance in the contemporary spiral of what we would today call imaginary, fake, or virtual objects? Suspicion about the magic of images is very old, as is platonic suspicion or the presumption of metaphysical truth. The color of the paintings is called phármakon in Greek, the same word used for drug, poison. Bergera points out that a critical view of architecture depends on preserving the auxiliary character of images.
“Frame 3” (2022) by the Seños Cifrián team. At the Palau de Cervero in Valencia. Eduardo Alapont
The fact is that in his own book – a collection of texts produced for various commissions over the past decade – the repeated names, quotes and ideas do not always have the same meaning. We read that for Kindel – the wonderful photographer of the new cities of the National Institute of Colonization, in perfect harmony with José Luis Fernández del Amo, the apostle of abstraction of the fifties – “photography was a means and not an end”; that for Lucien Hervé, Le Corbusier’s photographer, “architecture becomes a means and not an end”; that for Bernard Rudofsky, a romantic activist who usually excites transgression professionals and was an organizer at Architecture Without Architects’ MoMA in 1964, “photographs are the end of discourse.” Etc.
Many architects such as Le Corbusier, Sáenz de Oiza or José Antonio Coderch also grabbed the camera
So are we talking about a photographic subgenre? Maybe seen from the inside in the photo. But architecture itself, through photographic art (no longer merely industrial or technical photography), acquired a status of fine art that, while never alien to it, now revealed, shall we say through affinity, its elusive manifestations. In addition to more theoretical or supplementary chapters (as interesting as that dedicated to the portraits of architects), in the first half of the book we cover a history that goes from Català-Roca and Juan Pando to Bleda y Rosa or Lluís Casals through Paco Gómez or the Photographers of the Mediterranean coast (in the pre-war period Hausmann or Margaret Michaelis, later Giorgio Casali or those of AFAL). The architects themselves, who were usually opposed to the photographic art they used, took up the camera many times: Le Corbusier himself, Oiza, Coderch… So the paradoxes are profound, they have ancient roots. Whether it was the chicken or the egg first, we can’t say. And if we can say it, we won’t say anything. Images multiply, spread. In any case, they distance themselves from every single truth of a single verbal, discursive formulation. We cannot enter these houses; they penetrate through the eyes.
‘Campus. University Architecture in Contemporary Painting”. Various artists. The Nau. Until September 3rd.
“Photography and Architecture”. Inaki Bergera. Turner, 2023. 368 pages. 22.90 euros.
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