Exhibitions
Francesc Guillamet. The second life of forms
Between culinary creation, industrial memory and passion for the motor, photography becomes a work of art capable of transforming matter into thought and the moment into permanence.
When I look at a photograph by Francesc Guillamet, I see a work of art. Technical excellence, compositional intelligence and an overflowing ingenuity transform a culinary creation, an industrial fragment, a motorcycle or a landscape into images with their own personality. The object has one existence; the photograph opens up another.
In contemporary still lifes there is a double authorship: that of the chef-artist and that of the photographer, who makes it a visual experience. The food material begins to act within another sensitive order. A sauce acquires pictorial density, and a gelatine supports an architecture of light that evokes Malèvitch or El Lissitzky. The bread becomes the snowy Pyrenees or Dalinian hats, with a visual poetry close to Brossa. Loaded with everyday life and memory, it becomes an open sign. Guillamet recognises the possible picture within the plate and dialogues with the tradition of Zurbarán and Sánchez Cotán. He has given permanence to Ferran Adrià's ephemeral universe: the plate disappears, but the image continues.
Between Irving Penn and David LaChapelle, concentration and a disciplined baroque coexist, in which every shine and every shadow participates in the whole. The perfection of the surfaces makes the organic seem artificial and brings us to the threshold of disbelief, as if we were listening to Descartes. From here a kind of ultranature is born.
His gaze is two-faced. Black and white and toned images dialogue with Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Català-Roca, Sudek or Catany. In the Farinera in Castelló d'Empúries, light excavates the memory of work: a joint seems like a suture, and a worn surface, a body. The copies of Carlos Barrantes, made from Northern Catalonia, add a poetic contraband: the passage from the instant to duration. The series on Maillol, of a noucentista nobility and with echoes of Lucretius, unites the body, the stone and the landscape.
The passion for the motor brings him closer to Manel Esclusa. The motorbike is both freedom and visual construction, with the face to the wind of Raimon and Dylan. There is also a commitment to the country, understood as a horizon of rights and memory.
Guillamet puts things in a state of possibility. His photographs have a second life: they continue to act on us long after the commission that originated them. They can be born from an ephemeral creation or a moment of light and remain with us as a lasting form of thought and beauty.
Francesc Guillamet. Infinite catalogue. The permanence of the ephemeral , an exhibition curated by Manel Gràvalos and Ernest Abentin, can be visited in the l'Escorxador Exhibition Hall of the Museu de l'Empordà until January 2027.
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