• With his particular decontextualization of objects, the Madrid photographer reinterprets every everyday element he finds in his path

Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958) tells us that, every time he opens a new exhibition, he always gets the same impression: to meet an acquaintance he has not seen for a long time. His ideas in black and white jump easily to the wall. And his irony screwed them with a twist. That intuition of his, curdled with winks and double senses, is already inherent in his gaze. There is no one without the other. Both feed back with each thought, with each shot. " In my work, I am the first spectator . I always keep that feeling," he says. "What I am looking for is to become aware of an intuition, of something that you perceive to be there, but that it would cost you to define it with words and that, visually, has greater possibilities of being defined. I try to create the image that I would have liked to find realized ".

He says that it is easier to work with objects than with people . Dealing with them and their lights and shadows is their way of exploring the multiple lives they enclose inside. The way to investigate the "infinite possibilities" that its conceptual burden throws. "Sometimes I think that, rather than working with the object, what I do is work with your aura, with everything that surrounds it." Until November 10, more than thirty of these perspectives are exhibited at the Elvira González Gallery (Hermanos Álvarez Quintero, 1), in the second individual exhibition that this address is dedicated to the artist, framed within the Madrid Gallery Weekend.

Madrid photographer Chema Madoz.

"By Madoz we know how many different lives they could have awaited for a match if their destiny had not been to finally serve our need for fire. All these worlds are unlikely, certainly, but not impossible : there they are before us to show us their reality, "says philosopher and art historian Luis Arenas. A sealed envelope, an ace of hearts, the rungs of a ladder or a chessboard may well, at any given time, serve as an alibi to mess with your favorite game: that of stripping everyday of its strictest sense and attributing it A completely new one.

"The fact of working with elements that we find in our day to day, which are common for any of us, makes things much easier," acknowledges the photographer. "In the end, the viewer is facing an element that he fully recognizes , that he has used. Thus, I believe that the result gains in effectiveness. If you use objects that are strange or that you do not know what they are for or what to do with them, everything would be very diffuse. It would be difficult to establish a discourse based on them. I think that part of that possible effectiveness is that we start from a known base that takes you to a less habitual place. "

Sometimes, the image is born from a sensation. Others, of an impulse. In the end, she ends up filtering her character, her way of seeing and understanding the world . "What I do is be aware, in an almost contemplation exercise, pending any situation, everything that surrounds you and, thus, things are emerging in one way or another," he explains. With the passage of time, Madoz has ended up recognizing in his work the course of the years. "My work continues to move within parameters that are recognizable. The fact that all concepts go to the same field as photography makes it become a kind of region, from which come ideas of places very different, very different. That use of photography is what makes the work more compact than it really is. "

Thus, between metaphors and visual poems, humor and irony weave an imaginary in which only authenticity fits. The same one to which he refers when he affirms that, despite not working towards a spectator, he is aware that he will be there and that, surely, the reading he makes will be carried out from a place other than he is in. "When I think the image works with me, I cross my fingers and think that the same thing can happen to someone else."

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