The Royal Palace
2009Photographic print on canvas318,4 x 276 cm
José Manuel Ballester received a fine arts degree from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1984. His early paintings focused on the techniques of the Italian and Flemish Schools of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 1990 he began to combine painting and photography, and much of his work since that time has featured architectural spaces, both interior and exterior. In 2010 he received the Premio Nacional de Fotografía in acknowledgment of "his unique interpretation of architectural space and light, and his outstanding contribution to the renewal of photographic techniques."
For Ballester, the rapid technological development of photography has enabled both viewer and artist to take a closer look at the world of art. Through photography, Ballester strives to encapsulate time, to make it stand still, giving respite from the passage of life by immersing the viewer in architectural nonplaces. Ballester is interested in empty spaces, in portraying people through their traces and reflections. His work investigates the loneliness of the individual and the contradictions of the modern world through architecture, transforming spaces into artificial scenes. Light plays a prominent role, with the hidden and the visible, and the public and the private, serving as aspects that reveal the human condition. The large-format images leave a path wide open to interpretation; to Ballester, the work invites the spectator to participate in the metamorphosis of reality.
Ballester’s search for the poetics of empty space has led to the series Espacios ocultos (Hidden spaces), comprising reinterpretations of masterpieces from art history, which he reworks by digitally altering photographic images of these earlier paintings to produce disquieting absences. Works such as Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) have allowed Ballester to revisit paintings of previous centuries, to approach them without having to renounce his own period in history. Velázquez’s most celebrated work of art, Las Meninas is a complex composition, constructed with admirable skill in the use of perspective, the depiction of light, and the representation of atmosphere. The paintings on the wall convey nobility and encapsulate knowledge of the best European artists of the 17th century; however, the depth of field in the painting, which limits the focus to the central figures and objects in the foreground and leaves the background blurred, anticipates the techniques of photography.
Original title
The Royal Palace
Date
2009
Medium/Materials
Photographic print on canvas
More info
Edition 1/2 + A.P.
Dimensions
318,4 x 276 cm
Credit line
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
