Jordi Socías / Photographs.
Naturalism cosmopolitan
In the photos of Jordi Socías not appear rural scenes, or processions or carnivals. No photo festivals or evocative still lifes or seeks to raise awareness of the “Spain empty”. Neither practiced a photograph that could be referred to as social or political −with the exception of the first stage “commitment” of the mid-70s− and is especially interested in landscapes, idealized, or in the formal aspects or technical architecture that surrounds us. Also aspires to reflect an anthropological or sociological or practice an experimental photography-conceptual.
What you can see or perceive in the images by Jordi Socías (Barcelona, 1945) that will be exhibited in the art gallery Fernández-Braso from Thursday, march 12, 2019, will be Naturalism cosmopolitana selection of photographs that runs throughout the trajectory of the photographer and that he owes his title to the writer and journalist Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, who stressed that form of photographer living and interpret life, with simplicity, without fanfare, without fuss, without opportunism, “a naturalism that never abandoned him, and that, together with a cosmopolitanism open and decidedly curious to construct such a special way of looking.”
The exhibition shows the particular world and characters unique to Jordi Socías you are interested in, and that we could simplify in two: culture and city or, in other words, art and street, without our knowing −in pictures Socías− where to start one and where the other. Individual portraits of artists (Dali, Stream, Gordillo) or film directors (Bertolucci, José Luis Rope); scenes of everyday life of the streets and neighborhoods of cities such as Barcelona, Madrid, Sicily, New York, Paris, Cuba, Beijing.... cafes, bookstores, parks, monuments, museums. Pictures of film shoots film −a genre in itself to Socías− and some scene isolated, strange, odd, perplexing. Images that go beyond what they represent, in the wake of avant-garde classics such as Surrealism, the “Nouvelle Vague” or Neorealism. Movements always given to the double meaning, the allusion, to wink, to the irony, of criticism, the desire, the bewilderment.
Photographs that also does not hide the influence of those teachers who have served inspiration: Man Ray, Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, Jean–Luc Godard, Bertolucci. Surreal, documentary, portrait artists, filmmakers. All of them present in this exhibition, in body or in soul, in 40 photographs from the exhibition. Thirty-six black-and-white. Four in color. The oldest performed in 1975. Most recently in 2017-18.
Jordi Socías is self-taught. Curiosity, intuition, reading, and friends have been replacing other ways of acquiring knowledge and sensitivity. His career began in Change 16in 1972. He has worked in agencies, in magazines, cut satirical, political and cultural as Madrid is killing me and The European. It was one of the founders of Cinemanía and photo agency Cover. Sand added to the journal Country in 1997. Fotógrafo of cinema films (Josefina Molina, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, David Trueba, José Luis Rope...).
His first exhibition took place in 1979, in the Gallery Spectrum of Barcelona. Throughout his career he has exhibited in galleries, art centers, museums and institutions such as La Caixa, Barcelona, the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cultural Center of the Villa, the Circle of Fine Arts, Fundación Telefónica and the National Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid. In the Andalusian Centre of Photography of Almeria. At the Cervantes Institute in Vienna, Rome, Krakow, and Belgrade. In the galleries The Factory, Fernando Pradilla, Ivory Press and Ana Arambarri.
This is the second exhibition in the gallery Fernández-Braso, after the one held in 2014. The opening will be on Thursday, march 12, 2020, from 19 hours.