RocioSantaCruz

Lourdes Grobet (Mexico City, 1940) is one of the most renowned contemporary photographers on the current art scene. Her work on Mexican wrestling has earned her wide international recognition, consolidating her view of the country’s urban culture. RocioSantaCruz brings together a careful selection of her work in the exhibition Lourdes Grobet. Lucha libre, which can be visited at the ArtsLibris bookshop, located inside the gallery, from the 6th of February. On the occasion of the publication of her photobook, Lucha libre. Retratos de familia, published by RM and available at ArtsLibris, RocioSantaCruz is preparing an extensive programme of activities and dialogues on the photographer’s work in the gallery’s courtyard.

Lourdes Grobet uses photography to undo the seams of power and censorship. Her art resorts to interdisciplinary, or rather, antidisciplinary practices: film, installation and performance come together in the visual experimentation of this photographer, whose gaze is always directed towards the blind spots of representation. Her work is a constant search for new artistic languages, as well as a defiance of any kind of formal or conceptual authority. It is not technique that sets the pace, but the affirmation of freedom.

Grobet unfolds an intuitive, as well as coherent, gaze. Hers is not a coherence born of convention, but born of the desire to show what remains hidden, set apart, relegated to the margins of society. Su trabajo sobre la lucha libre explora las raíces culturales del México urbano. Her work on wrestling explores the cultural roots of urban Mexico. For decades, she has portrayed the most emblematic characters in and out of the ring.

Grobet’s portraits stem from a childhood prohibition. Her father, a wrestling fan, refused to take her to the fights because she was a woman. Her reaction, years later, was to make enter the scene armed with a camera, and to make a place for herself. From this symbolic transgression, a strange and tender archive was gradually woven. A repository of lives, rituals and masks.

Lourdes Grobet’s available works

Following up on our last two issues for Paris Photo online, we present you the third and final part of our edition on the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) RocioSantaCruz works actively with the family archive of numerous FCCB artist and is an international referent for the study and dissemination of Fotoclubismo. Here we introduce you to the work of Rubens Teixeira Scavone.

Rubens Teixeira Scavone (Itatiba, 1925 – São Paulo, 2007)

The work of Rubens Teixeira Scavone acts as a meeting point for two artistic disciplines: literature and photography. As a pioneer of science-fiction in Brazil, he was a prominent figure for the Paulist avant-garde, he won the Jabuti Prize for Fiction in 1973 and was the President of the Academia Paulista de Letras, an organisation founded in the early twentieth century with the aim of disseminating Brazilian literature, especially to young audiences. His fierce social commitment with cultural accessibility finds a precedent in his mother, writer Maria de Lourdes Teixeira, and a successor in his son, the photographer Marcio Scavone, who is recurrently photographed as a child in Teixeira Scavone’s work. Scavone junior is, additionally, a prominent figure in Brazilian contemporary photography and author of some of the most iconic celebrity portraits of our time. Amongst them, the one he took of his father.

Rubens Teixeira Scavone. O menino o robô. c. 1952

Teixeira Scavone’s photography unfolds within the aesthetic parameters of the FCCB and reflects a common interest in abstraction, sharp contrasts and geometric figures. His work is the result of a profound narrative investigation, based on his search for experimental rhetoric and new visual effects, which grants his compositions a literary quality. Acting as short chapters, or photo-novels, his photographs open a portal into the world of narrative, all through the eyes of a writer, and through the words of a photographer.

Marcio Scavone. Space Portrait RTS. 1969

His work is included in the major collection of Museu de Arte de São Paulo(MASP) and the MoMA of New York, where it’ll be part of the exhibition Fotoclubismo. Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964from March to June 2021.

”La exposición Sin piel, concebida por Marina Núñez específicamente para Kubo Kutxa, presenta una selección de obras recientes que proyectan identidades maleables y empáticas con el entorno, donde los límites físicos y psicológicos se diluyen o duplican en los escenarios o paisajes de los que forman parte.

Sin piel habla de identidad, de la idea de frontera, del diálogo, casi siempre incómodo, entre lo conectado, ilimitado, abierto, blando y metamórfico, y lo constreñido, lo estereotipado y controlado. Evocaciones de un entorno en transformación y «en vías de destrucción», que hoy en día ha pasado de ser un asunto teórico a una problemática urgente, por las evidencias de catástrofe inminente, propiciadas por la crisis medioambiental.

En consonancia con las últimas ideas de la teórica Donna Haraway —que tanto influyó en el discurso artístico posthumanista de fines del siglo XX con su Manifiesto Cíborg (1984)—, la exposición invita, tal y como la pensadora propone en su último texto Seguir con el problema (2019), a reconfigurar nuestras relaciones con la Tierra y sus habitantes —humanos y no humanos—, aceptando que tenemos que habitar juntos un territorio herido. Ideas que resuenan con la obra de Núñez, donde los escenarios, si bien se presentan hostiles y distorsionados, se abren a la integración y a la simbiosis.”

Curator: Susana Blas

The artist Gonzalo Elvira (Patagonia, Argentina, 1971) has been awarded the Ciutat de Palma Antoni Gelabert Prize for Visual Arts 2020 for his installation Dreams. Previous recipients of this award include artists such as Núria Güell or Carles Congost. At RocioSantaCruz, we celebrate with emotion the recognition of Elvira, whose vision and sensitivity are a benchmark in the field of artistic creation.

Gonzalo Elvira (Patagonia, Argentina, 1971) studied at the Antonio Berni School of Visual Arts in Argentina and began his exhibition career in 1993. He currently lives and works in Barcelona since 2000, and combines his artistic side with an intense educational and pedagogical work concentrated in the Obra Door studio, which he manages and directs in the Gracia neighborhood. In 2019, he received the prestigious Beca de Artes Plásticas by Botín Foundation, where he is preparing an exhibition for 2022.

Elvira has exhibited his work in numerous art centers and galleries both in Europe and America. In recent years, his works have been acquired by various public and private collections in various countries. He presented the exhibition Idilio (2019-2020) at RocioSantaCruz gallery, a germinal work that gives rise and continuity to his later projects, including the installation ‘Sueños’. Elvira received the GAC Artist Award for Best Gallery Show.

Visit the exhibition Idilio en RocioSantaCruz again.

In this third issue of Paris Photo online, we present you the work of Palmira Puig-Giró (Tàrrega, 1912 – Barcelona, ​​1978), an avant-garde photographer exiled in Brazil, whose work remained unknown until RocioSantaCruz discovered it in 2018. Palmira Puig-Giró was, along with Marcel Giró, Rubens Teixeira Scavone and Germán Lorca, among others, a member of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, one of the most important artistic movements in Brazilian photography.

Since RocioSantaCruz presented her for the first time in Europe at Paris Photo 2018, Puig-Giró’s work has been included in important international collections. The MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) will feature her photographs in the exhibition Photoclubism: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 in March 2021.

Palmira Puig-Giró. Estudos, 1950

A rediscovered signature

For decades, Palmira Puig-Giró was known as her husband’s muse, photographer Marcel Giró. It was not until 2018 that Rocío Santa Cruz, going through the Giró estate with the help of Toni Ricart, Marcel’s nephew, found two photographic languages, two different, albeit intimately intertwined, authorships which coexisted in the photographer’s archives. Following the traces of this unknown signature, they came to an important conclusion: not only was Palmira the author of a significant oeuvre, but Marcel’s own authorship acquired, thus, a new meaning. The tale of the artist and his muse became obsolete and gave way to a more complex, horizontal, and richer narrative. Both artists shared camera, reel, stages; each with their own look.

The faces of the avant-garde

Palmira Puig-Giró was, along with Gertrudes Altschul, Menha S. Polacow, Barbara Mors and Dulce G. Carneiro, one of the few women who were part of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, a collective of avant-garde photographers located in São Paulo. Her work articulates an experimental corpus of portraits and landscapes, where metaphor and social criticism are framed in the same capture. Puig-Giró’s photography is clearly influenced by the avant-garde, seen in her use of black and white contrasts, but her signature has a more humanistic touch than that of her Paulist colleagues. While the latter tended to sublimate the abstract, the pure moment of visual interruption, Puig-Giró goes beyond the instant and the object. The photographer widens her vision to show the surroundings of her photographs, the faces, stories and memories of the places she visits with her camera, and takes everyday life and gestures to an aesthetic level that is as detailed as it is poetic.

Dossier – Palmira Puig-Giró – Paris Photo online

For this second issue of Paris Photo online we proudly present Andrés Galeano (Mataró, 1980), an artist who works with drawing, photography, video, installation and performance. Andrés lives in Berlin where he develops his production. He has exhibited in cities throughout Europe, the United States, Latin America and Canada.

On this occasion we show you a selection of pieces from his Unknown Photographers series, a project where the artist makes collages with analog photos he randomly finds at local markets and where he reflects the latent desire inside every photograph to transcend the moment.

Dossier – Andrés Galeano – Paris Photo online

Following up on our last issue for Paris Photo online, we present you the second part of our edition on the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). RocioSantaCruz works actively with the family archive of numerous FCCB artist and is an international referent for the study and dissemination of Fotoclubismo. Here we introduce you to the work of Germán Lorca.

Germán Lorca (São Paulo, 1922)

Germán Lorca combined his professional career as an accountant with amateur photography, and joined the FCCB in 1949. It was not long before photography became his sole profession. In 1952, he quit accountancy for Good and opened his first photographic studio. As a direct effect of the fervent debates between FCCB members on experimentation and the limits of visual language, the early years of Lorca’s artistic career are marked by a frenetic productivity and a clear desire to transcend the established aesthetic codes.

Lorca’s work articulates an urban poetics of the streets of São Paulo, one composed of landscapes which become at once familiar and uncanny. Combining intimacy and estrangement, he creates ambiguous and suggestive compositions. Roland Barthes’ punctum acquires, here, an unforeseen leading role, as Lorca’s photographs are filled with perforations, tears, unsettling (mis)encounters hidden in apparently familiar scenarios. It is only when we look through these visual crevices, and not around them, that we can unravel Lorca’s fascinating imaginary, the lucid freedom of his gaze.

His work has been included in major collections around the world, such as como Banco Itaú (São Paulo), Museu de Arte de São Paulo(MASP), Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo), Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami) and MoMA (New York).

Dossier – German Lorca – Paris Photo online

In this fourth issue of Paris Photo online, we present you with the work of Antoni Campañà (Arbúcies, 1906 – Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1989), photographer whose work moves between pictorialism and avant-garde experimentation. Also known as a leading photojournalist, his photographs of the Spanish Civil War remained unknown until 2019. Campañà collected nearly 5,000 photographs of the war and kept them hidden for decades.

RocioSantaCruz is currently working with Campañà’s unpublished oeuvre. Paris Photo 2020 was to host the first international presentation of Campañà’s work We are pleased to share some of his photographs in this online edition.

The double gaze of Antoni Campañà

Antoni Campañà was born at the same time as photojournalism, a field in which he made his career as a sports reporter and pioneer of the tourist postcard. Before turning thirty, Campañà had achieved wide national and international recognition for his refined mastery of bromoleum technique. In the years before the Spanish Civil War, he received numerous awards and consolidated his position as an artist. He was a member of Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya and in 1933 he traveled to Munich to train with photographer Willy Zielke. He carried out an important work of experimentation and innovation, thus transcending the pictorialist parameters and becoming an unparalleled benchmark of experimental photography in Spain. From those early 30s, we still have compositions like Tracció de sang (1933), framed within the traditional portrait of farming and tradition.

When the war broke out, Campañà’s political commitment made its way into his work, leading him to compose an extensive photographic documentation of the war. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Campañà’s visual testimony remained hidden for decades. Thirty years after his death, his family found the images stored in red boxes, which come to light in La Caja Roja (2019), an investigation of Plàcid Garcia-Planas, the historian Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilaltaand the photographer David Ramos, published in Catalan and Spanish by Comanegra and by Éditions du Seuil in French.

Untitled, 1928-1930

Reflecting on this unknown period, it becomes clear that the Spanish Civil War opened a symbolic trench that Campañà was forced to cross, not only as a citizen, but also as an artist. As he moved from one side to the other, his career changed radically. The early Campañà, concerned with meticulous preparation and aesthetic harmony, gave way to a Campañà shaken by the frantic rhythms of battle, death and reality. His camera turned him into a witness to the horrors of truth, and only when shooting with the Rolliflex, which he reserved for portraits, did he allow himself to explore a more avant-garde style.

As a reflection of the ravages of war, the artist’s decision can be read as a symbolic attempt to bury an all too painful past. The Franco dictatorship foreclosed the mere possibility of creating spaces of social reparation where losses, both political and personal, could be avowed. Thus, Campañà’s silence regarding this period of his work is understood as a direct effect of the sheer lack of collective languages of mourning, an effect of the impossibility of addressing trauma. Campañà’s work speaks about the trajectory of an artist, about how his gaze adapts to the volatility of life, but it also speaks about the importance of collective memory. Thanks to his red boxes, today we can add new pieces to our narrative and find new words to name our grief.

Dossier – Antoni Campañà – Paris Photo online