Alejandro Guijarro: Spanish, b. 1979

1. The impetus, either of a body in motion, or of an idea or course of events (i.e. a moment).

2. Physics (of a body in motion): the product of its mass and velocity.

 

Momentum is a 3-year project in which Alejandro Guijarro travelled to the great Quantum Mechanics institutions of the world. Using a large-format camera he photographed the blackboards as he found them. This series display them life size.

 

Before he walks into a lecture hall Guijarro has no idea what he will find. He begins by recording the blackboard with the minimum of interference. No detail of the lecture hall is included, the blackboard frame is removed and we are left with a surface charged with abstract equations. At this stage they are documents. However, once removed from their institutional beginnings the meaning evolves. The viewer begins to appreciate the equations for their line and form. Colour comes into play and the waves created by the blackboard eraser suggest a vast landscape or galactic setting. The formulas appear to illustrate the worlds of Quantum Mechanics. What began as a precise lecture, a description of the physicist’s thought process, is transformed into a canvas open to any number of possibilities.

 

Momentum is a glimpse into the mysterious world of Quantum Mechanics, a branch of Physics that provides the only understanding we have of the world of the very small. Without these equations, physicists would be unable to design nuclear power stations, build lasers, or explain how the sun stays hot. Without Quantum Mechanics, Chemistry would still be in the Dark Ages, and there would be no science of Molecular Biology, no understanding of DNA, no genetic engineering at all. In his quest Guijarro has travelled to the very best departments of Quantum Mechanics, including Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and SLAC (The National Accelerator Laboratory) in America, CERN in Switzerland.

 

These are not works that pretend to hold any kind of objective truth. Stripped of their wrapping they are photographs of large drawings! Yet the process of finding, documenting and collecting them has a transmutational effect. The colourful equations remind us of Basquiat’s formulaic language and the white chalk evokes Cy Twombly’s later canvases. Each line and smudge has its own history and meaning, produced by a scientist unaware of their artistic merit. Momentum can be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between science and art and is an exciting development in Contemporary Photography. 

 

In this second season of exhibitions, we explore practices that advance a deeper understanding of our current context through work that broadens our vision of what contemporary art is today. Following our desire to continue with this investigation we decided to approach photography via the work of Alejandro Guijarro (Madrid, 1979). Alejandro’s work presents various challenges; to attempt to understand his practice through the traditional lens of a single discipline would be a sterile exercise.

 

Photography is currently one of the most complex disciplines to fathom due to the virality and manipulation of images to which we are currently exposed. But Alejandro’s work cannot be read merely as photographic; what you are seeing is created using a photographic process but they are not photographs. Alejandro’s previous series (Momentum, Lead) were similar to what is commonly perceived as photography, but it was discovering how he created them that interested us beyond the aesthetics of the result. In recent years, the process has become almost the whole of Alejandro’s work, perhaps because of his confinement during the pandemic when he locked himself up in his studio and learned to paint with the chemicals of hundreds of obsolete Fujifilm films – the series The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches – is closer to painting than to photography despite a photographic medium. Linking viscous fingering to the pictorial possibilities of the chemicals in the Fujifilms, he entered a maelstrom that led him to connect coincidences in time and space with a determined obsessiveness.

 

The fractality of viscous fingerings served as a pretext to investigate the pictorial potential of mathematical repetition, always using the same printed newspaper as his photographic medium. This exercise led him to discover what happens if you extend a mathematical pattern – literally – over a given time and space. And the result is the works we see in [LAPSO]. The fragmented sequences in each piece are obtained through a scanner and a printed mathematical pattern that is manually dragged down to different resolutions and beats per minute, then the title of each work contains its technical components: pattern-resolution-bpm. So, what do we have in front of us? A drawing or a photograph? They are both things and neither. This is why Alejandro’s work challenges us to broaden our ideas around the possibilities of photography as a medium. The works in this exhibition are the result of a long process which began at the moment when direct representation through the photographic act ceased to be of interest to the artist, but at the same time the photographic medium became inevitably attached to his artistic work. These artworks, beyond their aesthetic attributes and quality, show us that the obsolescence of a medium is probably an effect of the apathy produced by being accustomed to that same medium – photography in this case – and that it is very likely that artists (art) are who will pull us out of that torpor in order to recover our astonishment at something we have taken for granted. It is the experiments, the accidents and the almost absurd conclusions of an artist that give life back to a saturated medium allowing us to expand our capacity for wonder.