Albarrán Cabrera
"Very Subtle Light"

Exhibition: 20 January – 13 March, 2021

Used to travelling, Spanish duo Albarrán Cabrera has adapted its pace to the exceptional situation we are all facing. It is in the intimacy of the studio and the laboratory, in this cocoon of quietness and introspection, that they have found the inspiration they need. In return, they generously nourish their audience on social networks, publishing their photographs, but also sharing quotes and references, books, films, artworks, that open windows in this time of isolation and confinement to remind us that art and nature are wonderful consolations for troubled souls.

Under the title "Very Subtle Light", the opening exhibition for 2021 at the Esther Woerdehoff Gallery presents a new selection of their works and reveals their latest research to the public. In addition to the precious printing technique that has established their reputation among world collectors - a pigment print on Japanese gampi paper and gold leaf - other experimentations, chosen with mindfulness for each image, are also presented: silver prints, early cyanotype or platinum-palladium processes, the addition of mica and precious pigments or toning of the prints. For the first time, the artists also present the results of a brand new process : prints made on glass, a genuine "photographic object" that evokes the primitive processes and gives a fragile and transparent materiality to the image.

Chosen from their different open series, the works on show unveil Nature in a cosmological vision that evokes the earth, stones, oceans, trees and flowers, animals. All theses things that bind us to the planet as humans made of stardust, recent inhabitants of an ancient but fragile world, of a planet that is only a "pale blue dot" in the infinity of the cosmos. Through shadows, game of light or colors, their photographs always keep a part of mystery, a freedom given to the spectator for his own interpretation, his own emotion he can feel and relates to his experiences and memories. Through their works, Albarrán Cabrera invites us to "re-establish our relationship with the oceans, the Earth and Nature as a whole", a message essential to our humanity and for too long ignored.

This exhibition will also evoke the latest book, published this autumn in Ateliers EXB "Des Oiseaux" collection.

Available at the gallery:
"Des Oiseaux", Atelier EXB, 96p., 35 €
"Remembering the future", RM editorial, reprint, 64p, 55 €

Albarrán Cabrera, both born in 1969 and living in Barcelona, Anna Cabrera et Angel Albarrán have been working together for almost twenty years and form a rising duo on the photographic scene. Together, they develop a photographic universe, poetic and sensible where the emotion from the subject meets the beauty of the print. Experts in alternative printing processes and photo preservation, they frequently use historic processes such as cyanotype, platinum-palladium and other analogic technics but also invent original processes that they combined with precious materials like Japanese papers, pigments, minerals or gold leaf. Questioning identity and the traces the camera keeps of the past, their various open series evoke our relationship to time and memory and our perception of the photographic image between reality and illusion.