Jose Val del Omar

José Val del Omar - Bionic optics

Técnica: Slide projector. Bionic optics with chromatic and liquid adapters.

Biografía del Artista:

1 slide: 10,000 EUR 2 slides: 15,000 EUR 3 slides: 18,000 EUR Born in Granada in 1904, José Val del Omar, despite having lived there only in his youth, always maintained a profound Granadan feeling, which is present in a recurring manner in his work. From a well-off family, he discovered cinema at its beginnings, during a stay in Paris at the age of 17. Upon his return, he shot several films as an amateur and a feature film that he himself destroyed. After a voluntary retirement in Las Alpujarras, his mystical and orientalist vocation was revealed, which, together with his passion for technology, would give rise to Mechanicism, a personal philosophy that would define him as an artist. In 1928 he conceived and made several technical inventions, such as the “variable angle lens” (known today as zoom), the “concave screen”, the “panoramic image” and “tactile lighting”, which, at only 25 years old, he exhibited in the magazine “La Pantalla” in Madrid. In the 1930s, during the Second Republic, he joined Luis Cernuda, Carmen Conde, Rafael Dieste, Ramón Gaya, Maria Zambrano and other intellectuals and artists in the Pedagogical Missions, whose aim was to bring culture to the most remote and humble people and towns in Spain. Val del Omar made around 40 documentaries during the Missions (which have since disappeared and have not yet been located) and around 9,000 photographs of great technical and aesthetic value. It was during this period that Val del Omar became established not only as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, but also as a one-man band in the Missions and the People's Museum. In 1934-35 he filmed the ethnographic documentary Fiestas Cristianas/Fiestas Profanas in Cartagena, Lorca and Murcia, in which he tried out the “variable angle lens”. In 1935, he filmed Vibración de Granada in two days, dedicated to his hometown. In 1973, his daughter María José and his son-in-law Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga gave him what would be his last laboratory. Freed from administrative obligations and with his own space and means to develop his techniques, he put into practice what would be the most visionary of his creations, the PICTO LUMINICA AUDIO TACTILE. In this last stage he experimented with the laser and Bionic Optics that he had presented at the UNIATEC congress in Moscow in 1976. With this technique, Val del Omar made the spectator move around the images, distorting them optically. He also created the Plat Tetrascope - a projection technique between the still and sequential image - generating a universe of images and sounds, manipulating all of this through the “Mesa Truca” also created by him. The result is hundreds of diakines and tetrakines, recordings of “beaten” sounds, super 8 films, and among others, the filigree of Variations on a Pomegranate. Most of his collages, as well as many of his techno-poetic writings, which capture the keys to his mechano-thinking, also date from this period. Decided to return to cinema to capture the vortex of his Elemental Triptych of Spain in a final work, Ojala, he was surprised by death as a result of a traffic accident in August 1982. Since then, Val del Omar has been living a growing Endless, just as his films and the works of an artist without end end. Exhibited in: "From Gutenberg to Faraday", 2018, Max Estrella Gallery, Madrid. Armory Show, 2019. "Cinema of Sensations: The Never Ending Screen of Val del Omar", 2023, MoMI, New York.