‘Vanitas’

Castro Prieto, one of the best representatives of the generation of Spanish photographers that emerged in the eighties, has rescued from his photographs a repertoire of images belonging to different series such as Extraños, Paisajes imaginarios or Cespedosa. And as if it were a deck of cards, he has distributed them on the walls of the gallery to compose Vanitas, a cabinet of mysterious arcana behind which the certainty of death and the fragility of life can be sensed, always with a certain touch of irony and humor with which he seems to want to strip such abysmal matters of transcendence. His work travels through the personal and family spaces of his childhood with an autobiographical gaze with which he explores the latent traces of memory and underlines the dreamlike and literary aspects of daily life. In his alchemical vocation, Castro Prieto has turned the confinement forced by the pandemic into an opportunity to explore the possibilities of gold in the positive processing of his works. In black and white, applying layers and layers of silver gelatin on glass and, after that, 24-carat gold. And, in color, with mineral inks on acetate. The use of the golden metal has allowed him to highlight the symbolic and allegorical value of these vanitas of deliriums and fleeting lights populated by strange and fascinating characters. The result, a visual poem and a technical display by this great photographer and darkroom virtuoso.