The National Prize for Photography, Alberto García – Alix, presents at PHotoESPAÑA 2022, in collaboration with the ENAIRE Foundation, his Fantasies in the Prado project, an evocative work in which the artist intervenes on some of the works in the art gallery .

In this work, Alix uses analog photography and double exposures as tools to create an evocative series in which she reinterprets great works of art .

Fantasies in the Prado is the result of four years of work (2018-2021) in which the photographer Alberto García-Alix has managed to create his own imaginary, from the art gallery that houses the Prado Museum, using the laborious technique of multiple exposure on analog film.

“Each painting is a world. And as such, I have taken it to invent and build a new one”, admits the photographer. With his gaze, his imagination, the superimposition of images, the focus, the blur, a small flashlight and the vibratory movement of his camera as the only tools, Alberto García-Alix has repainted some of the Prado's masterpieces, creating phantasmagorias, granting mystery, tension and movement to the painting, and giving flesh and breath to the sculptures.

Alberto García-Alix's relationship with the Prado Museum began as a child when his mother, a graduate in Philosophy and Letters in the History branch, took him, along with his brothers, for a walk through the museum's rooms and lectured them on the history and technique behind each work. Those visits left their mark on him, being today an avid reader and great connoisseur of Spanish history, in addition to considering the Prado as the best photography school there can be, especially portraiture. Among his favourites, those made by Antonio Moro for the Duchess of Feria and María Tudor, works that he has included in this new photographic series and that captivate him due to the psychological dimension of their protagonists.

The trigger to start this project arose in 2017 with the commission of two photographs by the Fundación de Amigos del Museo del Prado to commemorate the Bicentennial of the museum. "Twelve photographers were entrusted with our own interpretation, a look in intimate visual communication with the Prado," says García-Alix. "Once the work was finished -he adds-, I was still fascinated by the photographic dialogue that I could find in many of the works and I decided to continue, on a personal basis and with the permission of the museum, my photographic hunt through the Prado".

Regarding the creative process of the Fantasies in the Prado series , García-Alix says that he has looked in communication with history, politics and art: “I have appropriated time, light and brushstrokes. I have taken those of their authors. Those of Goya to repaint his half-buried dog, those of Velázquez to remake Las Meninas, I have veiled the Gioconda under a terrorist stain of white paint, I have taken over Rubens's frenzy to capture what he did not dare to paint in his period, and I have taken a self-portrait with the mask of a beast with the help of Rosa Bonheur... Nothing is valuable, or comparable to the emotion I have felt working with the paintings”.

“Garcia-Alix's photos make us see with his eyes when we enter the Prado some paintings or sculptures that have sometimes been with us for more than four hundred years, that were created in a past very different from the present time and that, however, his images are close to us, as of our days, as if time had not passed”, summarizes the art historian Manuela Mena, former deputy director of Conservation and Research of the Prado Museum, about the photographic series Fantasies in the Prado by Alberto García -Alix.