EXCHANGE OF GLANCES. © cccassinello

Conversations and analogies between the great masters of photography Carlos Pérez Siquier, Ramón Masats, Luigi Guirri, Franco Fontana and the photographer Cristóbal Carretero Cassinello. A tribute to Spanish-Italian photography and a demonstration of the contemporary and eternal validity of the vision of these visionaries of photography. THE SUBCONSCIOUS REVERBERATION. Text by Josep Fábrega Agea. Begues, June 2020. Art and Photography Critic. Perhaps in the creative mind of many photographers, a subconscious light reverberates on the burnished surface of our visual imagery acquired after years of careful observation by these great masters of Mediterranean light, as in the case of the photographer Cristóbal Carretero Cassinello in this fascinating project. A light romantically recreated in the present by Cassinello in visual analogy with Luigi Ghirri, Franco Fontana, Pérez Siquier and Masats. The Mediterranean light reverberates again in each photograph as if it had just been taken. The theme and time of those series taken by these great photographic masters taken between the 70s and 90s are still fresh and highly topical. The five authors have a certain fragmentary look and even a strong pop accent that characterizes it. The imaginary of pop culture and the aesthetics of abstract informalism are present in fire in our collective unconscious. They are so recent that the presentation of the project is overflowing, timeless and somewhat ironic. We especially see in Pérez Siquier and Cassinello how color reverberates joy, cleanliness and an optimism, again, inevitably pop. The analogies presented in this project compose a puzzle of images in which, without letting each piece make sense on its own, its beauty or ingenuity reverberates together. Hence, the individual strength is multiplied by the strength of each of the pieces that compose it. Pérez Siquier, Cassinello, Ghirri, Fontana, Masats coincide in the joy of color, while the smell of saltpeter, the mineral composition of the walls, the explosive flare of summer is almost perceived. They oxygenate our eyes and recharge the aesthetic battery of clean beauty and even inevitable joy. Analyzing the project in depth, we see that all pop art is there, in all five. Through the images where reality and aestheticism are combined with the trends of modern art of the 70s: pop aesthetics, irony, graffiti, everyday life, surrealism, naive, kitsch, expressionism in color and balance of forms to exaggeration about all in Siquier and Fontana. They are inventors of spaces united by the similarity of their innovative images, documentary makers of the beauty of the Spanish-Italian light in harmony with movements such as Fluxus and Pop Art. On the other hand, we observe in the photographs that sometimes nothing can be more unreal than reality itself. Unreality coexists with reality as a ghostly vision emerging from the invisible. It is the coexistence of the old street photography and the new street photography. All of them hide a double or triple reality: one the reality that is photographed and another the creation of the new reality that the viewer perceives. They magnify the everyday. Pure photography on the street, without manipulation, with another reality, full of surrealism. This aesthetic reverberation shows us three own and simultaneous planets: the figurative, the abstract and a certain magical realism and without ceasing to exalt beauty through pure documentary. His works are framed without concessions, in a direct, shrewd, brilliant way, from an alternative and personal approach, capable of turning images into lasting, reverberations that are fixed in the mind as fragments of a dialogue that only echoes, like scenes of an unfinished work, leading us to find attractiveness in what others would see desolation. There is something there that gives us strength: the space reduced to substance, reverberating with color and light, a refinement of photographic perception, an intentional silence. We become spectators of a dystopia that surrounds us, in a surprisingly warm way. I already finish this prologue-presentation with the words of Cassinello: "The really interesting thing about this project is that you can compare the works of those geniuses with their analogies and then do a contemporary reading in the present, giving more importance if possible to their images, which in my case have made up a good part of my imaginary, aesthetic sense and passion about photography. This project is a tribute to photography in capital letters, to that cultural photographic heritage and connections between photographers that inexorably shape our photographic path”. Let us allow these reverberations of Mediterranean light and personal worlds to guide us throughout this “Exchange of glances”.