Documentation

Dream Visions of Tarragona

The artist Martí Ribas presents us his personal visions of the city of Tarragona. As he has done previously with Barcelona and Reus, and taking as his subject some of the most important sites of the city, he has created photomontages which are immense, unreal panoramas, or circular compositions, that the artist calls 'isolated worlds'. This sense of unreality, which comes from completely changing spatial perspectives, is counterbalanced by the fact that the work deals with places which are completely recognizable, and which, even if we have not visited them, can easily be identified. he thus creates a play of contrasts which has a particular attraction because they both exist and do not exist. The amphitheater, the cathedral, the walls, the upper part of the city - these are the place that Martí Ribas reconstructs in his own way, through digital manipulation. In addition, it is notable that the dream-like atmosphere is emphasized by the absence of any element that indicates or evokes the idea of movement.

Tarragona Worlds

Martí Ribas (Castellbisbal, 1955), with the delicacy of an entomologist, captures photographic fragments of a well-known place and then fits them together like a jigsaw. Each of these tiny fragments has been selected with the care with which a painter selects colours to paint a landscape that is familiar to him, but which he only retains in his memory. The result is surprisingly stimulating, in achieving a completely new point of view of a place through which we have passed a thousand times. Or perhaps the result is the imprint that an image leaves in our unconscious, when we have seen it so many times that we can pass by without seeing what we have in front of us. His approach is very coherent: a couple of years ago we saw the results of his work dealing with Reus, at the Antoni Pinyol Gallery in the capital of the Baix Camp, and now he repeats the experience with a careful selection of works about Tarragona.

Spherical Space Martí Ribas (Castellbisbal 1955) exhibits photographs that I would call “expanded”, in the same sense of the term as “expanded cinema” in the context of experimental film, when directors like Anthony McCall made films that escaped from the screen. His photos are the digital sum of photos. Sometimes, they escape from their quadrilateral frame, and not out of decorative whim, and they have an irregular shape, with straight and curved lines (his three Diàlegs, or Dialogues). In other cases, they comprise 360-degree scenes presenting the horizon in a normal manner (as a straight line) or even as a circle (understanding space as a sphere and not according to two vertical and horizontal axes: this is what is happening in the urban scene entitled Tarragona 2). Martí Ribas likes to play with the ambiguity of representation, somewhere between the realistic and the manipulated. Less interesting are his Manneristic scenes with figures. Contrast Gallery, Consell de Cent 281, Barcelona, until 6 November.

Seeing Differently At times, as when wanting to draw attention to the works of Martí Ribas, radicalism is imposed on us by the strange nature of what we want to write about. In that case, it is probably best not to say too much about it, but simply recommend it, and that is all. But even doing so, I am sure that by not keeping completely quiet, we will destroy his poetry. Did I say “poetry”? Rather, in Martí Ribas, spatial meta-poetry, or the poeanalysis of synesthesic perception. Because he makes our look listen to that which he makes us expend while we taste the tactile rumour of the aporias of space with time incorporated. In fact, this very inspired magician multiplies space by time and divides it by another space-time, the one invented by him in his pieces of work. Having seen these in MX Espai, they have over time ended up by adding the M of timeless metarealism to the X of space constructed as an unknown quantity that paradoxically, and sensitively, interrogates us about how we look and see and how we would be able to perceive everything if it were not for the consolidation of the clichéd look questioned by Martí Ribas. The reality he shows could have been ours; you could even say that we would be able to remember it if social conventions had not altered it so much for us.

Martí Ribas’ Pictorial Photography These are photomontages with an intense pictorial vision. Martí Ribas has used the camera to obtain a great number of stills from the interior of La Pedrera. Combined together like colours in the fragmentation of forms, they guide us into seeing the building as if it were a planet in the middle of the cosmos. While in another subject, he enters into the magical world of toys, injecting them with life by using shadows and Alice’s mirror. With this exhibition, the Contrast Gallery in Calle Montcada (Barcelona), to which the gallery owner Paqui Delgado has become associated, has initiated a new phase within its commitment to young contemporary art. It is evolving, just like Martí Ribas, who uses the wide range of resources of modern digital techniques to affirm the creative spirit of painting. I recommend a visit.