(Miradas/Sitios experimentales, 1971-1996)
La mirada chicana de Ricardo Valverde
Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City
April 19 – July 15, 2018
Valverde’s attitude towards the medium of photography was simultaneously freeing, multidisciplinary, and experimental. One of the key characteristics of Valverde’s practice is that he did not recognize a dichotomy between the aesthetic, the documentary, and the conceptual. His work is oblique and may be simultaneously conceptual, political, self-critical, playful, ironical, experimental, erotic, intimate, public, same, other, and so forth. His work cannot be defined with a single label, and even less with one that denies the conceptual and aesthetic singularities of his work within the context of contemporary photography.
Valverde built a dark room wherever he went: he produced solarized gelatin silver prints, double exposures and negative transfers with great success, and worked with Polaroid and slide film. He also experimented in video, which he employed with similar wide-ranging strategies as his photography. Some videos portray intimate family conversations; others produce slightly surrealist visions of incongruent drives along freeways, with added elements that disrupted narrative, linearity, and the sensical. In the early 1990s, Valverde began to revisit his earlier photographs from the 1970s and early 1980s, and intervened, or reworked, them, by cutting, collage, scratching, marking, and painting. He went as far as to convert the picture plane of a photograph into a painting, where none of the original image may be visible to the eye but still informs the composition and theme of the work.
Exhibition View: Experimental Sights, 1971-1996 (Miradas/Sitios experimentales, 1971-1996) la mirada chicana de Ricardo Valverde, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, 2018
