"Chema Madoz 2000-2005"
Borja Casani

All matter is full of sense and its place in the world gives it meaning. Chema Madoz works with the sense of things as if it were actually matter. The task of materializing sense is undoubtedly a poetic exercise and therefore initially I would emphasize that his oeuvre produces an essentially poetic perception. Madoz uses objects and their graphic representation as if they were words from a very clear vocabulary.

By analyzing the hazardous map of signals that things emit from the places they occupy in the world, Madoz individualizes, disrupts, confronts and manipulates until he is able to show a new order, the hidden face of sense, a new symbolic truth that by its impact highlights the disorder of logic. The things, the objects, transferred to a new location and stripped of the natural environment where they performed their functions, now emit different signals in front of the camera. Converted into signs, they are now literally talking. Or even better, they are images that are literarily talking. Because by basing himself on the aesthetics of similarity and the proximity of points of reference, Madoz displaces the natural sense of concepts to other forms of comprehension, fully exploiting their symbolic potential and resolving their discourse with figures and tropes closely related to language: visual analogies, metaphors, paradoxes or metonymies that invite viewers to a game of poetic perception and demand their active participation.

Madoz's work, therefore, has many literary neighbors. His compositions approach minimalist poetry and the contrast of poetic images that produces a metaphorical explosion with evocations ranging from the Mallarmé of "A throw of dice will never abolish chance," to oriental haiku, which combine two different images that are finally related in the third verse. They may also recall the greguerías of Ramón Gómez de la Serna : "The giraffe is a carpeted animal," or "Suicidal flowers grow amidst the railroad tracks," or, what is perhaps my favorite: "Know yourself too well and you'll refuse your own handshake."

here is also a line connecting Madoz's work with artists who express themselves using the irony of objects, such as Marcel Mariën or the Marcel Broodthaers of, for example, "Casserole et moules fermées", which Broodthaers himself explains in a way very reminiscent of Madoz's work: "The bursting out of the mussels from the casserole does not follow the laws of boiling, it follows the laws of artifice and results in the construction of an abstract form." Madoz's encounter with Joan Brossa is also well known. They worked together on a book (Fotopoemario) before Brossa's death in 1998, and Madoz's work has also been compared to the visual poems of this Catalan poet with whom he obviously shared a fine sense of humor and the ability to establish associations between objects to produce evidence, although Madoz, as Castro Flórez has pointed out, focuses his lens beyond the mere presence of the object and its semiotic displacements to contribute the ultimately photographic dimension of his work.

photograph is inherently the capture of a fleeting instant. All of Chema Madoz's work shares this clear relationship with the ephemeral. The conjunction achieved does not need to exist either before or after being photographed. The materiality of the idea is not the final goal of the work performed, but merely its frame, its portrait or, as in the traditional snapshot, its exact moment.

he black-and-white format also lends a melancholy distance. The scale of grays turns things into shadows which, faded within an unreal world, express themselves as ghosts. They preserve their iconic identity but are absorbed into an abstract metalanguage. We recognize them although they no longer belong to this world. Madoz works with the shadows of things to obtain a plastic elegance that blends his entire work together, giving it formal coherence and enabling him to perform a technically accurate surgical exercise.

Sense and precision are decisive elements in articulating an idea. Madoz collects ideas whose trail can be followed perfectly by observing the strange objects scattered around his studio, now unattached machines. His system of accumulation can recall the cabinets of curiosities held in such esteem by the surrealists: André Breton's workshop or Gómez de la Serna's El Torreón. As in Arman's "Accumulations" or the objects trapped in Joseph Cornell's boxes, Madoz has searched all over the world for meaningful material, but the objects he finds, orders and builds are not essential to his work; they are just the subsidiary elements he uses to photograph an idea.

Chema Madoz works on the delicate border existing between the real and the imaginary. In his work he proposes to us a split between what exists and the long shadow of what is possible, a counterpoint between the essence of things and their latent meanings. The poet Pierre Reverdy, quoted by Eduardo Cirlot in his A Dictionary of Symbols, says: "An image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot be engendered by a comparison but by the coming together of two distant realities. The more distant and accurate the relationships between the two realities brought together, the stronger the image and the more emotional power and poetic reality it will possess." Curiously, Cirlot offers us this quotation to analyze the symbolic power of the Equivocal. What is equivocal intrinsically contains the possibility of error, with the consequences that implies. An error produces the instantaneous perception of what is correct. It calls for order or equilibrium to be restored. But in itself it is a road without return; its effects remain and create reality. According to Reverdy, creating equivocal images forces you to err only in the exact measure required.

hema Madoz plays in this field by using many tones; tones that vary from pop humor to a deep revelation of the hermetic language. This range, which Madoz expresses very naturally, must have something to do with the spirit of the things themselves which also have their own language.

There are objects in Madoz's work that demonstrate a unique metonymic ability for showing transformations. Thus he uses one stone for drawing (a track, an exclamation mark, a thought), for sculpting (a cactus, a tree) or for manipulating (a globe). In all cases, the stone contributes its weight and apparent insensitivity.

he chessboard and its pieces also appear frequently in the artist's images. He uses them to prepare a refined variety of games within the game or, by simply placing the board on the piano, he establishes a perfect analogy between geometry, complexity and music. The board is equal to the challenge.

ater, matches, maps, clocks, books, spoons, musical notes and various tools also appear regularly and offer enigmatic senses filled with symbolic power. In some cases, it is a single object that has been slightly transformed: with a simple oblique movement, a small pair of scissors becomes a jet plane, or a somewhat deformed hairpin turns into a weeping eye. In other cases, the object is a patient subjected to a serious operation: a drain embedded in the planisphere offers a dizzying visualization of the universe. On occasion, however, Madoz offers us sculptures built on purpose to obtain a specific result: wire that becomes a transparent cactus or a barbed-wire cage.

ometimes objects are linked to other objects by forms and sometimes by concepts.

adoz constantly revisits certain concepts: Time with its measurements and fears; Feelings, which are strangely hardened in his work as shown by the playing card containing a five of hearts made with fish hooks or the violent couple TU (you) and YO (me), or his caustic allusions to Consumption, where he ironically uses the well-studied and forceful tools of advertising photography.

Many of the moments photographed have been prepared to exist only for the instant the camera records them, particularly those obtained in nature (raindrops on sand or water, the cloud caught in the bird cage, the musical notes hanging from branches like fruit, the grass crosswalk...). Nature is alive; it is active. Anything built on nature becomes transformed. The ephemeral nature of these works recalls the earthworks of Andy Goldsworthy or Richard Long which once photographed are abandoned to the vagaries of the climate and gradually become blurred until all traces of them are erased.

he works made with ice cubes also belong to this category and Madoz uses their short existence as a metaphor for success, good fortune or gifts.

One very important part of his work comprises sculptures or installations that could perfectly well be shown in an exhibition space in their true physical condition. Madoz presents them to us as photographs. Many of the pieces composed of musical instruments or scores belong to this concept: the cymbals and hi-hat from a set of drums that have been resolved with vinyl records, the score installed on a church portico, the cello-oar... they all belong to a universe parallel to that of Christian Marclay, an artist who centers his work on music and sound and who, unlike Madoz, produces his work indiscriminately in photographs, installations, sculptures, video and even live actions.

he sets that Madoz builds in which light is reflected on a plane also belong here: the delicate piece where Tanizaki's poem "In Praise of Shadows" appears illuminated by the light from a window, the moon reflected on the stage curtain or the strips of negatives that stop light from entering. These are mysterious images imbued with suspense and evocation. And the ladder leaning on the crutch. They are all photographed scenes, captive in their informative frame.

t is usually true that our information about the current state of contemporary art is mainly photographic. We learn about it through photographs. Whatever the technical resources and format of the exhibition space, the documentation that we receive about all works and that ultimately becomes available to everyone is their photographic reproduction. Therefore, although occasionally we have been able to see for a few minutes Robert Gober's pieces containing shoe-clad, cut-off legs spread along a wall with candles or tattoos adorning the thighs or his Madozian deformed playpens, the final result is the photograph of an object that expresses for subjective understanding this idea of misery, trauma or wounds. Photographed symbolic power.

any artists work as if they were at the ping-pong table, successively playing on both sides, confronting the poles between the icons of the prosaic and the high cultures. Today a good deal of art responds to the words of Georges Bataille: "It is clear that the world is pure parody. All we see in it is the parody of something else; it is even the same thing with an even more misleading form." This is true of Vik Muñiz or Wim Delvoye among others who, like Madoz, insist in their constructions on the effect of appearance and its ironic visual result. Delvoy proposes, for example, a floor made apparently of old tiles decorated with complicated arabesques, whereas in reality it turns out to be a delicate drawing made out of bologna sausages and ham (Marble Floor). But next to Delvoye and his lovely baroque constructions, Madoz seems a contemplative monk. I have the same sensation when I try to consider his work within his generation in the international art scenario. There are many artists who work with images according to the objectives proposed by Pierre Reverdy and within Bataille's perspective, but Madoz alone does so from a Stoic viewpoint. Madoz always performs a balanced exercise of self-control. He tries to appear as little as possible in his work and lets things and objects speak for him. That's why he places them in a neutral space at the precise distance.

o illustrate his way of working, Chema Madoz attempts a risky experience for the first time in this exhibition: he has installed a physical piece in the exhibition before photographing it. And this is risky because it is unusual for Madoz, accustomed as he is to the time and silence of both his studio and nature, to have to do his work under such close circumstances: while his exhibition is being mounted and in time to include a photograph on the cover of the catalogue. The ghosts of all his ideas and images, which for some reason or another never came to life, meet there.

he piece is composed of 28 wooden ladders joined together at a 15º angle to form a large circle. It will remain installed throughout the exhibition and afterward, once its goal has been reached, only the photographic image will remain.

he large circle of ladders is converted forever into something else: spider web, radiant sun or a metaphysical metaphor of life and death. The circle contains steps that all lead to the same point, which is the center and also the end.

This collection of Chema Madoz's photographs invites us to participate in a game of perception. The images speak to us; they suggest we take a stroll through understanding. But this is not a question of finding the solution to a hieroglyph. The enigma has been resolved existed in potential before the artist found its plastic resolution and revealed the unfathomable sense of the things that calmly and silently spend their time talking in the places we have assigned them. Spanish version