Exhibitions
Carles Mercader photographs the fragility of life through others
‘My Damn Heart’ opens at the Sergi Sánchez Gallery, a black and white journey through faces, bodies, and urban settings, where each image becomes a form of memory and an approach to the ephemeral condition of existence.
Amid the intense day of openings that Barcelona is experiencing this November 12, the Sergi Sánchez Gallery stands out as a must-visit stop to delve into the photographic universe of Carles Mercader. At number 76-78 Aribau Street, the artist presents My Foul-Hearted Heart, an exhibition that can be visited until January 11 and proposes an itinerary through images that oscillate between intimacy, representation, and the awareness of disappearance.
Mercader photographs faces, bodies, and fragments of the city as if constructing a fiction made up of moments snatched from time. Each image contains a presence, but also its reverse: a possible absence, a footprint, a memory that is already beginning to fade. In this sense, the photographs function as memento mori, small visual warnings about the fragility of life and the impossibility of retaining what inevitably vanishes. The artist himself expresses this with a revealing statement: “I am not me, evidently. I am the others I photograph.” A declaration that places otherness at the center of his practice and understands portraiture as a form of mutual recognition.
The exhibition route is constructed from a highly intense black and white photograph, with visible grain, deep blacks, and almost burnt whites that deliberately forgo pleasing nuances. The strength of the contrast accentuates the materiality of the scenes and gives the images a harsh, direct, yet poetic atmosphere. The faces are approached to the point of placing the viewer before an almost physical confrontation; bodies appear fragmented, cropped, or hidden behind a grate, while urban spaces become surfaces of memory and signs that demand careful reading.
The city here is not just a simple stage but an organism full of traces and everyday strangenesses. A door of a Korean establishment with graffiti dripping on the glass, a classical relief of the centauromachy, or the branches of a tree seen from below are some of the images that articulate this visual inventory. Mercader finds in these seemingly insignificant fragments an evocative capacity that transcends anecdote. The gaze pauses on what often goes unnoticed and transforms it into a presence loaded with meaning.
A significant part of the exhibition is dedicated to portraits of artists and people from his circle, figures with whom Mercader maintains ties of knowledge, admiration, or affinity. We find the Catalan poet Maria Sevilla, visual artist Oriol Miñarro, burlesque dancer and choreographer Ella Muah, Andorran poet and writer Teresa Colom, sound artist Vic Baladoch, poet David Caño, and the photographer and muralist from Cádiz based in Barcelona Teo Vázquez. Also appearing are PiluXs, shibari binder and model, and artist and performer Marcel·lí Antúnez, in this case through an unusual portrait that dispenses with the face and replaces it with an image of the soles of his feet. A way to question conventional codes of representation and to explore to what extent a person can be recognized beyond the features that usually identify them.
'Centauromachy'. Analogue medium format 6x6 negative photography. Digital giclée print with pigmented inks on Photo Rag Baryta 315g paper.
This gallery of presences reveals one of the most suggestive dimensions of Mercader’s work: photographing others is also a way of speaking about oneself. Identity does not present itself as a closed reality but as a construction made of relationships, gazes, and shared experiences. Each portrait thus becomes a space of proximity but also of enigma, where the camera does not merely document an appearance but seeks what remains hidden behind the surface.
The title of the exhibition, My Foul-Hearted Heart, comes from a text that Mercader himself has written to accompany the show and starts from an etymological reflection on the meaning of remembering: “to pass again through the heart.” This idea condenses the profound meaning of the project. The images are not only fragments of reality captured by the lens but experiences that have crossed the artist's sensitivity and return transformed into visual memory.
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