Instant Mental Pleasure
EN/ES
Text by Alazne Zubizarreta
First published in Los Perros, Bilbao, Spain, 2018
I write for pleasure. I consider myself an amateur, and despite it’s possible use as a pejorative, being so doesn’t bother me, because as the very word indicates, “amateur” is someone who does it through love; an “aficionado” that decides how far to take his will and dedication. From time to time I determine to feed that drive, because I think I have something to say. It does not have to be important, it does not have to be lavish, but it may be worth it in some way, and I keep hoping that something will suddenly sprout, or spurt. For that I have to overcome resistances that are always there, mitigate them through the trade, through “doing”, as I like to call it. Writing will take me to something, to a place I did not even know I had. I browse the images, and sparks illuminate different parts of my perception. Photographs that embellish me, others that leave me feeling indifferent. Some attract me and repel me at the same time, in a morbid way. Others make me uncomfortable. I cling to these stimuli to help my word flow, getting to work will solidifying and securing what, in my head, is a constant come and go of ideas that accumulate and slip away as soon as I attempt to verbalise them.
The total is presented as a bale, a composition, a set; accumulation of records in which he deposits his vision and generates his own reality by patching up odds and ends. Family, violence, sex, or existence itself are latent on the surface as a way to approach them from the sensitivity of his gaze. Interest arises more in the concatenation of images than in the lucidity of a single shot. They build ambiguous, polyvalent reading experiences, alternating objects and spaces, and people that ultimately are nothing more than subterfuges to address self-referentiality. An atmosphere of physicality, traces of human inhabitance that intoxicates everything. Eschatology, fluids, disquieting looks, calm glances. Agents that shed their person in front of the camera because it becomes part of the situation. You can notice the concern in the plastic treatment of his images, and how they are going to be consumed. And this is seen in the structure and rhythm acquired by reading the texts that interact with the snapshots. These brief writings are testimonies treated in the form of an image that enrich the body of work, giving it a compactness that the separate elements could not have achieved.
The result imbues me with the constant feeling that the future is dark and uncertain, that I advance along a path blindly, and often falling into the temptation to bask in the "what ifs", because they suppose a kind of break away, an instant mental pleasure in which you end up wandering parallel realities that you build, projecting both your desires and your fears, seeing yourself in idyllic situations that you think you envy or dystopian stories that you thank yourself for saving, to please yourself with the good of your situation. Despite the fact that Gómez Selva denies it, there is a generational discourse drawn in the treatment of group identity elements, in which traces of his presence lie implicitly, crystalising in the form of prints that exceed all and any intimacy to end up submerged in their own concerns.
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First published in Los Perros, Bilbao, Spain, 2018
I write for pleasure. I consider myself an amateur, and despite it’s possible use as a pejorative, being so doesn’t bother me, because as the very word indicates, “amateur” is someone who does it through love; an “aficionado” that decides how far to take his will and dedication. From time to time I determine to feed that drive, because I think I have something to say. It does not have to be important, it does not have to be lavish, but it may be worth it in some way, and I keep hoping that something will suddenly sprout, or spurt. For that I have to overcome resistances that are always there, mitigate them through the trade, through “doing”, as I like to call it. Writing will take me to something, to a place I did not even know I had. I browse the images, and sparks illuminate different parts of my perception. Photographs that embellish me, others that leave me feeling indifferent. Some attract me and repel me at the same time, in a morbid way. Others make me uncomfortable. I cling to these stimuli to help my word flow, getting to work will solidifying and securing what, in my head, is a constant come and go of ideas that accumulate and slip away as soon as I attempt to verbalise them.
The total is presented as a bale, a composition, a set; accumulation of records in which he deposits his vision and generates his own reality by patching up odds and ends. Family, violence, sex, or existence itself are latent on the surface as a way to approach them from the sensitivity of his gaze. Interest arises more in the concatenation of images than in the lucidity of a single shot. They build ambiguous, polyvalent reading experiences, alternating objects and spaces, and people that ultimately are nothing more than subterfuges to address self-referentiality. An atmosphere of physicality, traces of human inhabitance that intoxicates everything. Eschatology, fluids, disquieting looks, calm glances. Agents that shed their person in front of the camera because it becomes part of the situation. You can notice the concern in the plastic treatment of his images, and how they are going to be consumed. And this is seen in the structure and rhythm acquired by reading the texts that interact with the snapshots. These brief writings are testimonies treated in the form of an image that enrich the body of work, giving it a compactness that the separate elements could not have achieved.
The result imbues me with the constant feeling that the future is dark and uncertain, that I advance along a path blindly, and often falling into the temptation to bask in the "what ifs", because they suppose a kind of break away, an instant mental pleasure in which you end up wandering parallel realities that you build, projecting both your desires and your fears, seeing yourself in idyllic situations that you think you envy or dystopian stories that you thank yourself for saving, to please yourself with the good of your situation. Despite the fact that Gómez Selva denies it, there is a generational discourse drawn in the treatment of group identity elements, in which traces of his presence lie implicitly, crystalising in the form of prints that exceed all and any intimacy to end up submerged in their own concerns.
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