Vari Caramés
20 Apr - 08 Jul 2012
VARI CARAMÉS
ritmo mareiro, 1980-2012
Curator: Miguel Fernández Cid
20 April - 8 July 2012
The exhibition overviews Vari Caramés’ most significant series, starting with La movida viguesa, Coruña by Night, Castelos de Galicia, Compostela and Visión animal, from the 80s and 90s, whose central thread is the use of black and white, small scale and an interest in recreating the everyday seeking a timelessness that leads him to steer away from frontal views, look for apparently random effects or give images sepia tones.
As the decade of the 1990s closed, Vari Caramés began to show his first colour pictures, keeping up the aesthetic of midtones, pictorial effects, and evocative images. He broadened the scale and unwove the colours, achieving seductive results, as is reflected in the series Miraxes, Tránsito, Escenarios and Recreo. In them, other searches can be perceived, such as the changes in the works’ supporting medium and scale, seeking to force the plastic effects.
The Nadar series, created from shots taken in the mid-to-late 80s, deserves a special mention. Copies of that period and the series that he presented in 2010 are shown, the negatives having been digitalized and copies prepared in a format where the frame takes on a more frontline role.
Together with these series, the show offers photographs that, although they do not fit in with the manner of working described, work as intermediate links, “detached verses” as Vari Caramés likes to put it. As someone who never set out to make a living from photography, he can no longer live without it. A stranger to fashions and trends, his interest lies in making something quotidian and ordinary, things of small significance that generally go unnoticed, prove extraordinary. He wants to suggest, evoke, make the spectator dream: from reality he strives to show the mystery. That is why many of his photographs are blurred, softened, as if trapped in a dream. And in an endeavour to evade the direct, he also captures reflected images, details that are scarcely perceptible to the human eye.
He is not interested in either preparing the shot or in building a scenario but, rather, guided by chance, he likes to play with exposure times, shutter speed, focuses, camera movement or diaphragm aperture in the infinity of photographs he creates with his 35mm. camera, almost as if the photographic device were acting independently of his own eye. Afterwards, the moment arrives to select all this vast amount of material, discarding some and approving others. Because, as Caramés himself declares, “one can always draw felicitous effects from defects”.
Nevertheless, although the results appear to be a product of the fortuitous, there is a deep knowledge of painting, of composition, of framing and of colour temperature. For, at the end of the day, it is the photographer’s eye that does the choosing.
THE ARTIST www.varicarames.com
Vari Caramés (Ferrol, 1953) lives and works in A Coruña. A self-taught photographer, his relationship with the medium started off at the age of fifteen when his father made him a present of a completely manual Voigtlander camera so that he could photograph his paintings and pieces made of wrought iron. Later, he used photographs as a crib for drawing exercises in Technical Architecture studies that he did not eventually complete. Since 1984 he has shown his work in over 200 individual or collective exhibitions and has taken part in a host of photography workshops and congresses as a speaker, jury member and photographer. His work is to be found in various collections belonging to institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Fundación Ayuntamiento in Alcobendas, the IVAM in Valencia, the Photographic Study Centre in Braga, as well as in private collections in Europe and the United States.
ritmo mareiro, 1980-2012
Curator: Miguel Fernández Cid
20 April - 8 July 2012
The exhibition overviews Vari Caramés’ most significant series, starting with La movida viguesa, Coruña by Night, Castelos de Galicia, Compostela and Visión animal, from the 80s and 90s, whose central thread is the use of black and white, small scale and an interest in recreating the everyday seeking a timelessness that leads him to steer away from frontal views, look for apparently random effects or give images sepia tones.
As the decade of the 1990s closed, Vari Caramés began to show his first colour pictures, keeping up the aesthetic of midtones, pictorial effects, and evocative images. He broadened the scale and unwove the colours, achieving seductive results, as is reflected in the series Miraxes, Tránsito, Escenarios and Recreo. In them, other searches can be perceived, such as the changes in the works’ supporting medium and scale, seeking to force the plastic effects.
The Nadar series, created from shots taken in the mid-to-late 80s, deserves a special mention. Copies of that period and the series that he presented in 2010 are shown, the negatives having been digitalized and copies prepared in a format where the frame takes on a more frontline role.
Together with these series, the show offers photographs that, although they do not fit in with the manner of working described, work as intermediate links, “detached verses” as Vari Caramés likes to put it. As someone who never set out to make a living from photography, he can no longer live without it. A stranger to fashions and trends, his interest lies in making something quotidian and ordinary, things of small significance that generally go unnoticed, prove extraordinary. He wants to suggest, evoke, make the spectator dream: from reality he strives to show the mystery. That is why many of his photographs are blurred, softened, as if trapped in a dream. And in an endeavour to evade the direct, he also captures reflected images, details that are scarcely perceptible to the human eye.
He is not interested in either preparing the shot or in building a scenario but, rather, guided by chance, he likes to play with exposure times, shutter speed, focuses, camera movement or diaphragm aperture in the infinity of photographs he creates with his 35mm. camera, almost as if the photographic device were acting independently of his own eye. Afterwards, the moment arrives to select all this vast amount of material, discarding some and approving others. Because, as Caramés himself declares, “one can always draw felicitous effects from defects”.
Nevertheless, although the results appear to be a product of the fortuitous, there is a deep knowledge of painting, of composition, of framing and of colour temperature. For, at the end of the day, it is the photographer’s eye that does the choosing.
THE ARTIST www.varicarames.com
Vari Caramés (Ferrol, 1953) lives and works in A Coruña. A self-taught photographer, his relationship with the medium started off at the age of fifteen when his father made him a present of a completely manual Voigtlander camera so that he could photograph his paintings and pieces made of wrought iron. Later, he used photographs as a crib for drawing exercises in Technical Architecture studies that he did not eventually complete. Since 1984 he has shown his work in over 200 individual or collective exhibitions and has taken part in a host of photography workshops and congresses as a speaker, jury member and photographer. His work is to be found in various collections belonging to institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Fundación Ayuntamiento in Alcobendas, the IVAM in Valencia, the Photographic Study Centre in Braga, as well as in private collections in Europe and the United States.