I would like the viewer to leave the room with the awareness that traveling does not require to move, that everything around us can reveal a different side simply by changing our point of view, and that poetry can exist right in our own room.

(Chema Madoz, 2020)

Galería Elvira González presents, during the PhotoEspaña 2026 Festival, the fifth solo exhibition by photographer Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958). The exhibition brings together 34 photographs from 2024 and 2025.

For decades, Madoz has produced his images from everyday objects, photographed in the studio with natural light. Rooted in surrealism and influenced by René Magritte, his work is intuitive and driven by the unexpected. “What interests me is the idea of discovery, of perceiving mystery within the everyday.” He works with one or two elements at a time, only with black and white which brings him to childhood and the dreamlike. The combinations he establishes between objects disrupt conventional logic, and in this way, his photographs convey the sensation of encountering something both familiar and strange.

Among the new works, a recurring motif in his career, a cage, appears open; the birds that have escaped now scatter across a map. In another image, a falconry glove holds, instead of the talons of a bird of prey, a butterfly. In this way, Madoz introduces us to the idea that things in the world are not entirely self-evident. No matter how domesticated they might be, or how clearly named or defined, objects always retain something for themselves.

Madoz describes it as follows: “For me, in some way, each object carries with it a word or a set of concepts determined by its use, form, or evocative capacity. Playing with them, when determining their position or their relationship with others, alters and multiplies their possible meanings. It opens up cracks in perception and offers us an idea of reality that is tremendously malleable.”