Chema Madoz: Poetic Voice, Visual Silence and Transgression

(continued)

 

These examples lead to another form of transgression overwhelmingly present in Madoz’s work: a transgression of the senses. The artist juxtaposes the audible with the edible (as with the musical martini glass, and with the cherry notes tree), the visual with the tactile (as with the feather candle or the stone-bag), the audible with the visual (as with the musical chessboard or the earphone-earrings) and the odorous with the tangible (as with that hot cup of coffee releasing a ‘snake-shaped’ aroma).

 

Chema Madoz’s output in its entirety crosses boundaries between artistic practices. The examples mentioned above indicate juxtapositions between literature, plastic arts, culinary arts and music. However, his work also defies the classic separation between poetry and image and between poetry and photography, as well as the traditional distinction between photography and painting, which is essentially the difference between ‘taking’ and ‘making’. As John Szarkowski recalls: “The invention of photography produced a radically new process for capturing images, a process not based upon selection. The difference is basic. Paintings were made but photographs, as we say colloquially, were taken” (in Catherine Coleman, 2009:15). His ‘photo-poems’ are both made and taken. Madoz is neither just a photographer, nor just a painter, poet or inventor. He rearranges or invents objects and photographs them. To convey the impression of veracity, Madoz prints and exhibits his photographs life-sized, generating an uncanny sensation of something that oscillates between the familiar and unfamiliar.

 

Finally, the ultimate transgression deriving from Madoz’s work is that of ontological certainty. The artist’ photo-poems question our perception of reality. His presentation of them, however, is never fetishistic. The object is a means of gaining narrative, lyrical, philosophical and metaphysical expression of the spatial, the temporal, the sensorial and the linguistic. By transposing lyrical devices onto these objects (e.g. hyperbole, metonymy, synaesthesia, literalisation of metaphor, suspense, ellipsis), these lyrical objects question a reality that we have conventionally admitted as true and normal. Through these ‘photo-poems’, Madoz brings to life creative associations hidden in those simple common objects. These objects reveal the frailty of this pre-supposed and pre-established conception of reality and invite us to see it with different eyes by exploring unusual, unexpected, abnormal combinations of the ordinary. This process recalls Gaston Bachelard’s argument for the liaison between the imaginary and the perceptual: “We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them” (Bachelard 1943:5-6).

 

Madoz creates a space for reflexion on the artificial constraints between senses, word and silence, language and visual codes. In this creative space, the diverse artistic practices do not lose their distinctiveness. On the contrary, by being recombined, their potentiality is enhanced and their singularity reinvented.

 

Chema Madoz’s work is found at: http://www.chemamadoz.com/

 

 

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