Jorge Fuembuena

Jorge Fuembuena (Zaragoza, 1979). Live and works in Madrid and Nantes
He explores the boundaries of the subject and the fragile boundary that separates the individual from another, and investigates the relationship between human and his environment.
He has developed his creative process in Artist Residence Programs such as the Contemporary Art Center in Essaouira ( Marroc), the Upernavik Museum (Greenland) or the Noass Art Proyect in Latvia.
Fuembuena’s work has attracted many accolades. In 2011, he was awarded with Air Fellowship. Kultuuritehas Polymer. Tallinn, OCEMX Mexique D.F. Prize , Art Generations Caja Madrid 2011 and ARCO portrait Photographer or as well as finalist in both the International Festival Emergent. In 2009, he was announced as the Emerging Artist Award in the St.Isabel of Portugal Art Prize .
As well, he was awarded with the Sta. Maria de Albarracin Grant or the Encontro New Artist Grant . His work has been selected in Photoespaña 2011 Festival and nominated in the 2011 European Sovereign Art Prize ( Hong Kong) or Fotomuseum Wintherthur Plat(t)form 2013.
His work has been published in magazines such as OjoDePez, EFE24, New_Papers , 30y3, PMS 485C,...
His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and is included in public and private collections such as Buñuel Foundation or CDAN.

Holidays

Wood Stories

http://www.jorgefuembuena.com/index/ 

http://www.30y3.com/esp/?cat=64 

Light without Shadows
Lola Garrido

Light is the first animal of the invisible.
José Lezama Lima 

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
Georges Braque, Pensées sur l'art

The portrait’s appearance becomes strange when cold and inert faces emerge from the mirror. Jorge Fuembuena draws the world with a luminous gaze that crosses the glow and triggers a definite sensory confusion, a style of photography that at times is lucid in its near invisibility. His is a visual aesthetic that makes one think of what is ideal, static and transparent, and of the timeless work of modernist romantics, a non-saturated, highly subjective way of seeing, so emotionally distant that it is almost impersonal.

The dramatism provoked by this full luminosity that can even blind us invokes the celestial and returns a clearer image to us.

Jorge Fuembuena’s photography is free of shadows. Beyond their white boundaries, a stony calm prevails in his images, caused by their radiant characters capable of extending a halo of light and inspiring in the viewer a powerful illusion. Observing Fuembuena’s images, you tend to think that the light has still not arrived, that the perceptible has vanished and that some thread of a dark shadow will arrive immediately.

In his essay Camara Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes asserted that if you couldn’t delve deeply into photography it was because of its evidence. In the past, photography was used to record an unfathomable reality; it was like a live trace of an unrepeatable moment. Contemporary photography is also light writing, but its language is the perfect bait for a trap. Jorge Fuembuena’s photography is a good example of these aesthetic coordinates, an exercise in full luminosity that becomes magic where the transparency in the image’s limpid shapes confronts sparks of dark signs that make it very difficult to decide whether the message is real or invented.

His shots imply a certain mystery or bear something unexpected without revealing any secrets. And if we continue to speak the normal language of commonplaces they touch on truths that continue to be important as time advances. To put it briefly, these carefully selected photographs are not only beautiful, they are as far as they can possibly be from what is trivial or gratuitous. Jorge traps us with a fantastic luminosity and deploys a mysterious poetic atmosphere that envelops, seduces and captivates us, making us believe that these blurred photographic images are the perfect representation of what is real.

And in doing so, he defines post-modern art in good measure, because he defends a purified aesthetic that encloses an ironic, penetrating discourse. In this direction, current emerging art makes spiritual contact with the mannerist movement. Refined manners, wrapped in a gracious environment are no more than a mask for complicated moral difficulties.

In this artist’s photography one senses a delicate synthesis emanating from irony. His characters are shown as concentrated yet uneasy and they are part of settings that have been devised based on a discourse of studied iconography. Aby Warburg – the father of the iconological trend – would tear apart every gesture in search of telling notes on personality, a condition that reveals the portrait’s subject by resorting to the collective unconscious, which offers more data than what is shown by simple appearance.

This discourse contains less clarity that it seems, and to illustrate one of the series with greatest perspective, Fuembuena recruits a group of characters to bring them face to face with their backs to reality. These are portraits that disturb, that bear a personal seal. The same impatient sensation is produced by the Holidays series of landscapes. This cycle of images confronts a reflection on “artisticity”; at first they seem to be ordinary everyday snapshots of mundane subjects. Only a closer approach leads to a critical introspection that reaches a metaphysical dimension: a kind of ecstatic concentration between the human being and his world.