Mountains of Uncertainty

I always liked landscapes, both the natural and the imaginary ones. I walk in the first ones with my body, and with my mind in the latter. But there are mountains and valleys in which we go through without knowing it. They are unpredictable, unstable and sometimes discouraging. In them we are but data, dots in a fictitious landscape not created by Nature but by a human mind’s abstraction. I reject the language used in macro economic trends, its statistical models, their projections and the threatening speech. But even though their materialistic look, I perceive a kind of aesthetic behind graphs and their changing geometry. Mountains and mathematical graphs: landscapes similar in shape, but opposite in essence. Behind the ephemeral financial status of companies or countries and the changes in social trends, lays the serene presence of perennial, undulated mountains that call me to inner peace and reflection. So, when the heavy weight of technology, political interests and speculation exhausts me, I find shelter in my own mountains. I mold and print them like a hermit in the red cavern of my darkroom, as a cave artist would do. Based in the real, they belong to an imaginary world, an inner space that beats in my hands and in the memory of that hominid ancestor, who followed the creative impulse that we today call art. …………. Notes: The upper contour of each group of mountains is in fact the line of different graphs I took from economy magazines or from Internet. Based on these single lines I made a negative. Then I printed them on Fiber Base Gelatin Silver paper. I work lifting the emulsion from the paper, and creating patterns and textures by blowing or piercing the liquid gelatin. The color depends on the developers and toners used. Each is one of a kind.