José Quintanilla

José Quintanilla | Mi casa, mi árbol 7

José Quintanilla

Mi casa, mi árbol 7, 2015

Pigmented inks on Hahnemühle cotton paper mounted on cardboard museum

21 x 31 cm

about José Quintanilla

Yecla, (Murcia), 1963

José Quintanilla focuses on landscape photography understood as the relationship between man and the territory that surrounds him, the space between the human and nature, the frontier between reason and chaos. Memory, recollections, the search between beauty and absence.

Among the monumental representations, the ruin will become the key to our collective memory, the gateway to the dream world which, as Marc Augé said, places us in a "pure time, without date, but with memory". The ruins reaffirm the roots of our past and establish our heroic references. As generators of memory on demand, they recreate the Western vision of a history that clings to an idealised but necessary past to confront the threat posed by the arrival of the industrial revolution and modernity, while soothing consciences troubled by increasing environmental degradation, the overexploitation of natural resources, the ruthless use of children and slaves, and the appropriation of other people's wealth in colonised territories. The passage of time blurs the distinction between the original and its copy. The ruin and the photograph, with its supposed documentary veracity, as representations to underpin our fiction". This photographer's works reveal the invisible connections between film and people. The same movement runs through them: that of the passage of time.

On the one hand, the images capture the passing of time and people; on the other, the man who captures life, its marks, its wrinkles, its stiffness, its slowness and its memories. The links between the films and the elderly never cease. They are like a mirror of each other. They are archives, condemned to a fragile and ineluctable destiny.

Featured works