Mind’s Eye / Adrian Bondy Gallery presents the exhibition Attendance of Nacho Gomez Sales. The photographer presents his work as follows.
When I take photographs, I try that my images help to analyze the configuration of the space that is represented, its genealogy, as well as the use made of it by those who live there and those who have lived there. On the other hand, alongside this analytical aspect there is an irrational aspect in my work. I choose places that somehow appeal to me not only for what they are, but for what they were, for what is real and what is ghost, for how its past is both present as wrinkles in the skin. As Italo Calvino says in The Invisible Cities, the city is made up of the relationship between the measurements of its space and the events of its past. As if this space harbored a strange presence and photography was the medium that transcribed it, this is where the interest of photographing places lies for me.
As part of this exhibition, the photographs presented, taken between France, Spain and Italy between 2005 and 2019, are divided into two parts. At first we mainly find traces. Ruins and city walls echo between a latent past and a developing present. As light and time do on the surface of photographic film, a sort of memory is also recorded in these surfaces of stone and concrete, the juxtaposition of which is a range of temporary layers, to which urban gardens sometimes appear. as plants growing wildly alongside buildings.
Secondly, the daylight is gone, and we find the night, this temporary space where people sleep, and which in popular culture is always linked, among other things, to the unknown, to danger and to stories of ghosts. Night also means darkness, even if electric lighting in modern cities no longer leaves room for total darkness, the weak light which bathes the surfaces modifies them, thus changing their colors and shapes. An everyday and banal object can thus become an enigmatic and mysterious object. These photographs offer us a nighttime walk in a city without inhabitants, where urban elements such as trees, doors, windows or gates are the only protagonists. They were taken on a tripod with long exposures, to the point of transforming, in some cases, the darkness of night into daylight.
Nacho Gomez Sales
Born in Castellón de la Plana, Spain, Ignacio “Nacho” Gomez Sales studied photography at EASD in Valencia and at EASD Serra i Abella, in Barcelona. He then specialized in architectural photography at the IEFC in Barcelona.
In 2008, he left Barcelona and moved to Dijon, where he did an internship at the Council of Architecture, Environment and Urban Planning of the Côte-d’Or (CAUE21).
He settled permanently in Paris in 2009, where he has lived and worked since. Between 2010 and 2013, he completed a Masters in Visual Arts specializing in Photography and Contemporary Art at the University of Paris 8.
In 2017, his series on South Korea was selected in “Descubrimientos Photoespaña” in Madrid.
In 2018 he published a self-published book called London.
Since 2002, he has shown his work in individual and group exhibitions, notably in Castellon and Barcelona, but also in Paris, Orense and Gandia, as well as in media specialized in photography.
Since 2009, he has combined photography with his work at the Librairie du Center Pompidou.
Nacho Gómez Sales: Attendance
Until May 26, 2024
Mind’s Eye / Adrian Bondy Gallery
221 rue Saint-Jacques
75005 PARIS
06 85 93 41 92
www.mindseye.fr
Saturday and Sunday from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Monday to Friday by appointment
