Alfonso Almendros

My father’s wrinkles

Since Petrarca until today, the artistic experience of the landscape has the mark of subjectivity. For its existence as a genre, it implies that an observer is able to consciously experience a fragment of nature as a bifocal phenomenon: as an empirical territory and as a fragment of the soul. The connection between both parts is essential to carry out this process. Therefore, for the existence of the landscape is necessary to have an emotional interaction between the observer and the space that is observed.

Based on the incapacity of the human being to remember fragments of our past life before we develope a spoken language, this project proposes a detailed study of the lunar landscape and its cartography. A map is a symbolic representation of the reality but due to its graphic and two-dimensional character it is closely related with the imagination. It is a code like the letters of the alphabet which represents real things, but its interpretation it’s mainly related with the subjectivity of the observer.

To create a mental image of a person that we have not met is equivalent to try to imagine a landscape or space that we have never contemplated. In both cases their existence can only be confirmed from a dogmatic perspective of reality. We have images and testimonies that prove their existence, but due to the inexistence of our own visual experiences of that place,  we inevitably must resort to the imagination and subjectivity to create our own images and memories. For me, the moon and my father are similar elements in this ideology. Both are familiar but at the same time very distant, solitary and silent. Both are submitted to a kind of exploration or research  for certainties that can only be achieved through interpretation and vagueness.