Work – often at the centre of the artist’s projects – is seen as a crucial issue to reflect about human conditions in metropolitan cities. It makes you wonder about powers and their consequences on human existence, and question important aspects of migrations, considering how low paid labour and widespread exploitation have allowed the expansion of European and non-European metropolises.
The gap between urban and human dimensions is getting wider and wider, the most obvious sign being the exclusion of corporealness in favour of the imposing and overwhelming physicality of the buildings. On paper, the perspective levelling gaze flattens the complexity and discontinuity of the urban space, reduces any depths to the surface of what’s visible, leading to believing that only what can be seen can be represented. In this machine of measures and proportions, the real space is caged in a reassuring system of set coordinates more relevant than the bodies, filtering reality to produce an order, which, once confirmed and acknowledged, can be applied to the body themselves. We now know that looking at the world is not enough to understand it, not even through the heterodox eyes of the artist: “you need to pierce the skin of things to see how things become things and the world becomes world” (Merleau-Ponty M., L'Oeil et l'Esprit, 1964, Paris, Galimard), you need to reintroduce the bodies and their urgencies.
Sandoval’s works in the exhibition originate from these fractures, they go back to the bodies and their efforts, searching for the role of human beings as builders in the dignity of their labour, in an attempt to reconcile space and the practices that have produced it.
In the first photographic series, De la mano, su huella, working gloves enlarged to human dimensions, leftovers from a working site, tell the action occurred. Worn out and transformed by their use, they almost become casts of hands, suggesting corporealness without showing it. On their printed surface, little cardboard maquettes of the city have been installed, creating estrangement by inverting the dimensions
Juan Sandoval. Retrato – Plano. Photography, Lambda print on matte paper. Six images 40 x 50 cm each. 2014
ph. Albert Fedez