Can a single work summarize the age of the image? Blow Up brings us closer to that possibility. Not as a single piece - Antonioni's well-known film - but through the updates that, for more than half a century, have turned this title into a long-running project: from photography to narrative, from film to digital photography, from image to sound, from grain to pixel, from the Contax camera to the Remington typewriter, from black and white to color, from conventional development to digital printing. And from Queco Larraín to Julio Cortázar, from Cortázar to Antonioni, from Antonioni to Brian De Palma, from Vanessa Redgrave to John Travolta... All this is summarized by Joan Fontcuberta by pixelating the original mystery of Blow Up to the point where we can no longer distinguish its hidden truth. Leandro Feal's photographs, on the other hand, come from the tradition of Queco Larraín. Koudelka, Boris Mikhailov and other photographers that Fontcuberta tends to deconstruct and for whom reality tends to sprout suddenly. If Feal reveals realities, Fontcuberta unveils them. If Feal brings out the unseen, Fontcuberta deals with what we will never get to see. The pulse between the two defines the tension of photography throughout its history. And that tension makes this project not only an exhibition exercise but also a master class on the possibilities and limits of the photographic act.

 

Iván de la Nuez