Juan Gonzalez Fornés
gonzalezfornes.com
With his work Juan González Fornés brings a critical and committed look at the relationship established between the individual and his environment. His photographs and videos establish a dialectical relationship between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the individual and the social; exploring the limits between the different spheres and illuminating the mechanisms that operate in our societies. He pays attention to the blurred traces of the built landscape, analysing different social processes. The landscape intervened by architecture hides revealing traces of the transformations that have taken place. The landscape thus acts as an archive, as a palimpsest, as a memory to be updated in the present.
Just like landscapes, the individuals who are inscribed in it also speak to us, they also communicate with us; just by their way of being-in- the-world and showing themselves to it. Thus, following the principle of Walker Evans’ documentary photography, the photographer has to “accompany the model in his act of representation”. With his images, the individual shows revealing traits of himself, of his origin and his present situation; of his history as biography.