Jorge Fuembuena

Jorge Fuembuena - The end of the cathedrals

Técnica: Chromogenic printing mounted on Diasec

Biografía del Artista: He is a scholarship holder of the Casa de Velázquez artist (Academie de France in Madrid). He teaches photography at the Escuela Sur (founded by La Fábrica and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid), at the Photoespaña International Master's Degree (PIC.A) and at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED). He has given numerous Masterclasses at universities such as Nebrija, Carlos III, TAI and Arte10. He has been invited as a speaker at the Albarracín Photography Seminar and at the Gijón Photography Meetings.

The title announces it unambiguously. And from that moment on, in this series of photographs, what could be the testimony of beauty is nothing more than its testament; and the sublime, that emotional overflow that arises from our contemplative experience before a landscape, takes us on an inexorable drift towards melancholy. Jorge Fuembuena has chosen a territory bordering on myth, that of the Jakobshavn glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq), to undertake an endeavour with romantic resonances: the monitoring and precise recording of the movements of that enormous surface that wanders around the northern hemisphere, enveloped in a light that ignores the chronology of day and night. An ancestral mass of ice that is, simultaneously, a primitive place and an uncertain territory, where the changing morphology of its landscape is governed by chance whose parameters no one knows, because no one has described them. The glacier is a space that, when represented in images, challenges our perception of its scale. There are no recognizable elements in its ice that give us a clue about its dimensions; and without this extra information, our vision can only venture conjectures regarding what appears to be an aerial view, but which may be a set of small frozen fragments. These photographs do not provide certainties; the only thing that is certain here is the imminence of its disappearance. Knowing this territory, encompassing it, is a vain aspiration, because not only its forms are ephemeral, but also its location. Topographical notes latitude, altitude, longitude, etc. - illustrate a will that has lost the battle before it has begun. Accepting the impossibility of mapping that which has no borders and, nevertheless, insisting on this obsession is a way of assuming our imperfection, of understanding that we are sailing adrift, incapable of governing the present and even less the future. Perhaps this illogical enterprise is only the denotation of the dualities - life and death, order and chaos, reality and fiction - that coexist in this glacier that Fuembuena has turned into a metaphorical space: a blank canvas on which to write his relationship with nature. And to semantically expand these reflections, he uses a color and a light that invite us to emotionally experience the landscape. We are what we see, the American landscapers – painters and photographers – of the 19th century must have thought when faced with the spectacular nature of natural spaces: virgin and majestic. Through them they could symbolize the land that God had reserved for his chosen people. The epic of the American pioneers used the landscape as a stage for the Protestant paradigm: Man as the master and lord of Nature. Later, the catalogue of ruins that this pride has generated is the basis of the Fuembuena project. These silent photographs suggest these catastrophes and exhibit the author's position regarding ecology, but they also aspire to demonstrate that if we are what we see, what we see should also be able to change the perception of what we are. Alejandro Castellote