Sin título [Untitled] (2009)
Digital photograph
51.4 × 71.7 cm each
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2009.168.1
These two photos were taken in 2009, during his first artist residency, at time where he still did not have a defined pathway or own language. They appeared almost by intuition, as part of his contemplation as he walked near his home, at a threshold point where industry begins to be devoured by nature. The shift between the factory and the scrubland, between tarmac and undergrowth, here appears not as a metaphor, but rather as a close and physical fact, barely metres from the daily life of the artist.
The camera there acted more as an observation tool than an affirmation, recording that threshold where civilisation seems to yield ground, without any drama or taking an epic stand, as if it were just withdrawing. The factories are still standing, but no long producing, like skeletons of a system on pause. The landscape seems to be inhabited a nearly invisible, subtle strangeness, which is a hint of certain constants to come that the artist can only recognise now, with the distance of times: empty rooftops, industrial estates, abandoned spaces or no longer with their original function.
Karlos Martínez believes that these photos were not conceived as part of a series, but have taken on a sense of origin over time. They do not only mark a beginning in his art, but they also contain the embryo of many of the themes that would reoccur in his work: the memory of marginal spaces, the beauty of remnants, the silence of what no longer entirely belongs.