The show must go on

Fernando Pradilla Gallery presents the fourth exhibition by Spanish artist Juan Carlos Martínez (Campanario, Badajoz, 1978 - Madrid, 2023) in our space. The exhibition The show must go on, curated by Javier Díaz-Guardiola, proposes a dialogue between different work processes developed by Juan Carlos throughout his intense artistic career, articulating a discourse around the limits of the gaze in shared space and the strategies and modes of image capture.

The exhibition brings together a set of photographic series from 2005 to 2021, offering an exploration of essential aspects of Martínez's work, such as the representation of the body, the notion of masculinity, the image as testimony, youth, desire, as well as his aim to record the contexts and devices with which he captured his images.

Thus, the gallery's rooms feature images from his series Secret photography archive, Breakers, Spermopsida expedition, The bystander, Physical performance, A way of love, and Screen and windows, among others; works defined by Juan Carlos's conscious action of recording the photographed event in its spatio-temporal dimension. He was interested in documenting and testifying to the performative act of capturing his images, his modus operandi, which, as he himself stated, "is based on real experience, perceived and captured live, and then transferred to a realm of subjectivation, fantasy, and fiction."

The exhibition The show must go on emphasizes the portrait, which, as Juan Carlos noted in 2022, was a genre systematically adopted in his later years "as a new approach to the representation of youth, marking a turning point in the conception and meaning of the image; identities in emotional contexts, determined by the situation we were experiencing" (referring to the COVID pandemic).

And he continued explaining his most recent creative process: “The technical complexity of the image, using a medium-format camera and another tripod for the focus, with 50mm lenses, which is the most suitable for this genre, posed a challenge for me. My intention with the portrait is to study society through youth in different emotional states, associated with the context of the turbulent times brought on by the COVID crisis. A tribute, which will be forged over time, to each subject through our encounter, as a sociological study also related to the pictorial nature of heroic painting.”