Chema Madoz
26 April – 29 May 2019
Friday 26 April 2019, 6 pm - 9 pm, the artist will be present

Born in Madrid in 1958, Chema Madoz began self-taught photography and printing in the early 1980s, in the creative effervescence of Movida. He began exhibiting his work in 1983 while working as a bank clerk. In the early 1990s, he decided to stop photographing people and landscapes to focus exclusively on objects. The photographer picks them up in flea markets, shops or even garbage bins, randomly from his street errands.

He says, “With photography, I discovered the possibility of highlighting all the images that come into my head. By its brevity and intensity, photography is close to poetry. ». With the fragility of a cloud, a thread or a butterfly, Chema Madoz’s pictures sometimes plunge us into a waking dream, a frozen moment thanks to the magic of photography. Like the Japanese haikus, their simplicity is only superficial and invites us to meditate on existence and impermanence.

The creative process begins with an idea, a sketch and then materializes into an object, almost a sculpture, before the shooting and the printing in the dark room. Chema Madoz combines, assembles or opposes objects and photography reveals them, removing their banality and their colour at the same time. Chema Madoz takes his pictures in the traditional way, in medium format with a Hasselblad and in natural light. His studio is a creative space that allows him to work on several works at the same time and to bring together objects to imagine other chance encounters.

The Galerie Esther Woerdehoff has been representing Chema Madoz in France for almost 15 years. In 2018, we hold a large retrospective exhibition of his work at the Chàteau d’Hauterives - the Palais idéal du Facteur Cheval.

In the suite of this retrospective, we present a new perspective on the work of this great photographer, along with a selection of unseen photographs.

Text by Florence Pillet