JOSÉ MANUEL BALLESTER:
STRETCHING THE LIMITS

María de Corral / Lorena Martínez de Corral

José Manuel Ballester. Forests of Light, on show at the Tabacalera exhibition space of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, Madrid, marks the award of the 2010 National Photography Prize to the artist. The selection of works thoroughly traces his career over the past eight years and features fifty very varied photographs that provide an insight into the changes and developments in his work.

Three elements make up the leitmotiv of José Manuel Ballester’s oeuvre: time, light and space, which show the boundaries between two apparently opposite but interrelated languages, abstraction and figuration.

The exhibition features a group of works which are linked by a subtle thread and intended to provide an overview of the most significant characteristics of Ballester’s art. They show that his aim is not to develop a specific photographic language but to use the camera lens as a witness in order to account for, record, explain and question current affairs and progress. At first sight it might be said that the emphasis is on the diversity of the works rather than on any formal or thematic unity. However, despite this consideration, there are many connections of different kinds that link the works on display, creating codes that echo throughout the exhibition. Each work becomes the trace of a voyage chosen from among the many possible ones.

Ballester’s photographs are usually grouped into series that address the same theme – which is his way of committing himself to its true nature, as he himself explained to us on being asked how he goes about his work:

‘The process of my work is not marked by separate guidelines for each photo from when you envisage it to when you produce it and see it materialised. It’s more that each work is part of a flux of ideas, concerns, preferences that progressively emerge through the circuit that makes up each series I work on. One series then takes you to another and altogether they plot out a course and put together a portrait. I believe that my work is indeed governed by very clear themes: time, light and space. Taking it from there I have gradually found many ways of dealing with how these themes relate to each other.

As for the materialisation of these ideas, I have drawn from what are in principle very different disciplines ranging from paintbrush to computer, depending on at what point I decide on the most suitable means of conveying not just what I see relatively clearly but also the host of doubts and uncertainties you come across daily and which also surface and are conveyed in what I regard as an act of communication. Doubts that often also extend to the method and genre itself and even more so at certain moments of crisis when questioning seems a compulsory procedure to which we are very frequently subjected. Since my formative period I have been plagued by constant doubts about how to situate myself and where to find refuge in the vast domain of the art world. Within this huge creative space we all try to forge a path that enables us to find answers and the satisfaction of finding a meaning in your ideas, in what surrounds you. The creative process in itself is an instrument, a vehicle that allows you to get on in these worlds where you have to find your answers. Works are the proof that you are on the way to achieving this and the testament and confirmation that life is present. The quality of this journey depends on many factors which are what makes a difference, but all creative processes share this setting.’

Photography as a medium is capable of immediately transforming the act of seeing into an image of what we see, and in contemporary art photography has become somewhat less technically pragmatic and more poetically creative. The artist’s particular vision offers us a number of gazes that invite us to reflect on our reality, prompted by works that refer both to the traces of the past and to diverse cultural, social and economic aspects of the current time.

Ballester has an analytical and descriptive ability that makes the photographs he produces unique and they entice us to enter a world of its own that fluctuates between fiction and reality. The chosen works set out to recreate the experience of a certain way of looking at things and each plunges the spectator into a new universe that is neither reality nor fiction but the reality of a vision. In some cases the photographer becomes a stage designer, building a reality that causes the spectator to doubt whether what is photographed is reality or fiction.

José Manuel documents spaces from one or several angles, and his photographs provide an insight into how memory and knowledge influence the space and how it is judged by the spectator. His pictures, defined by motif and not moment, come very close to painting.

In this connection the artist speaks about the relationship between his facet of painter and the idea of producing a series like Espacios Ocultos:

‘The Espacios Ocultos series marked a reencounter with painting. When I began studying the world of digital photography I discovered how distant analogue photography was from painting. The invention of digital photography and its possibilities of manipulation brought a reencounter with the way of understanding the creative process that was very similar to the artistic procedures known to date. Indeed, I have always regarded the architecture of Photoshop, its design, as an extensive treatise on painting that recalls the great treatises written throughout history. This great affinity is what has created a very powerful movement that I like to call the “Neo-pictorialist” period.

and which is currently espoused by a large number of artists. It is also true that developments in this field occur at a dizzy pace and that possibilities are very quickly exhausted. What gives rise to this new visual container is a very fast-moving dynamics of exploration that was much slower in painting. Discovery after discovery take place at a frantic pace and are immediately followed by exhaustion and weariness, changing the spectator’s understanding and appreciation of the current photographic image.

This situation may lead us to feel somewhat disconcerted by our perception and portrays very well today’s context not only of art but also of the global world we belong to and in which we try and learn to get along.’

Ballester seeks something that goes beyond individual place, identification; he wants to reach beyond this limit, capture what it is that unites all traditions, structures and fragments. He broadens the field of his work to a global reflection on light and space. He stretches the limits of these boundaries and by doing so stretches his language. His photographs contain movement and stoppage at once, as well as a particular notion of reality and its visual and conceptual scopes. When asked about his sources of inspiration in recent years and the specific commissions he has received, he told us:

‘The themes that have accompanied me over these past years are basically related to the urban world. And within the broad range of motifs that can be found in this context, through my many trips to different countries I have focused on places that have experienced major social, economic and even political changes and are urban laboratories, in some cases of a surprising size, such as China and Brazil, the countries to which I have devoted the greatest effort. In these contexts I have witnessed the greatest urban transformations that have taken place throughout known history. The buildings and infrastructure erected in China in preparation for the Olympic Games held in Beijing in 2008 were a major showcase for making known its great development potential to the world. A powerful ambition fuelled all the projects implemented in what I would call China’s pre-Olympic period. But after the Olympics China continued to demonstrate its strengths with further projects and new challenges, fully entering a post-Olympic period that continues today. To show this process with my work and witness all these changes has been a great experience that has also brought me closer to Chinese culture, some aspects of which I have incorporated into my work, such as the understanding of space, which has been very useful to me. As for how I work in the context of commissions, my intention is to carry on contributing my personal point of view in this type of work. Indeed, this is what is most important to me, facing the same challenge in one context or the other. The most significant difference is only the commitment to meet deadlines, which can make the work more intense. What changes, then, is the pace of work and the need to set limits. So the problem is not whether you work one way or another but your ability to deal with problems and challenges. Therefore, even when having to conform to parameters that are imposed or suggested by third parties, the possibilities are still great, as great as you want to make them.’

Photography and architecture are two modes of aesthetic expression that seek to motivate the perception of those who view them. The works chosen for this exhibition show that architecture, like any document, bases its meaning on both its maker and its translators, in this case the photographer. Ballester seeks a balance between differences; between the known and the unknown, the bounded and the unlimited, always reflecting on the representation of the real. José Manuel Ballester is interested in spaces of friction between architecture and city, between painting and photography, between the ‘artificial’ and the ‘natural’; it is there that the ideas for many of his photographs are hatched. His work is often a reflection of the complexity of the urban experience that veers between globalisation and individuality. His pictures capture the essence of the city, its space, its time.

In the nature themes that Ballester photographs there is a constant exploration of the ways of representing the idea of the landscape in recent times. Artists like him have a special way of defining beauty, prolonging the sensation that the image has no limits. Many of his photographs offer the public the possibility of reflecting on the beauty and serenity of the landscape.

The artist uses colour as a natural means of expression, that is, as an integral part of the visible world we all know. Colour is the aesthetic force that guides him in his work, something important and basic.

Throughout his entire career José Manuel Ballester tells us of something that goes beyond the structures portrayed in his photographs; he tells of modernity, of memory, of the past, of the present and the future. His work is metaphorical, poetic and visionary; his pictures are enigmatic and beautiful, open and impenetrable.

DISTANT SPACES

Pedro Azara (UPC-ETSAB)

Like the horizon line, the low skyline of the city of Paris is silhouetted against the usual grey, cloudy sky, reflected in the wet slate and zinc hip roofs. An imposing golden lyre gleams like a strange star. Raised in the sky by a bronze Apollo that tops the building of the Palais Garnier, whose structure resembles that of a gold Latin cross, it hovers above the city, which it overlooks, and lifts it to the realms of the god of the Muses, metamorphosing it into an aerial or celestial city that blends with the translucent fluff of the clouds. This large photograph (París desde Garnier) might exemplify Ballester’s vision of the city.

However, José Manuel Ballester has produced landscapes with or without figures, still lifes, a few small sculptures – or models of sculptures – the occasional installation and intervention in space, quasi-botanical drawings (studies of leaves, for example), travel notes (using washes and watercolours, like an architect) and even a few large portraits. But although his painting has at some point espoused nearly all the genres of painting, Ballester is known chiefly for urban and architectural themes. Views from which figures are nearly always absent, almost as if this were a manner of looking at or representing the world, a filter on, or an approach to, the world, just as other artists make indentations, portray figures upside down or always smiling – with an expression that might represent sorrow or hilarity, one cannot tell – or use the same technique to represent them.

Until a few years ago, painting (chiefly oil on paper glued to panel) and printmaking (prodigious drypoints, heliogravures, etc.) were predominant, almost in black and white – Ballester admires the prints made by Rembrandt and Goya, as well as Surrealist prints and drawings such as those of Benjamín Palencia: one wonders if certain photographs showing inhuman or absurd cities might not reveal the taste for capturing the incongruences of life that is found in the art of the 1930s. Nevertheless, since the 1990s analogue photography and today digital photography in particular (on paper, also glued to panel), sometimes retouched digitally or by hand (Ballester remains a painter), has been the artist’s favourite technique for portraying urban and architectural themes.

This retrospective exhibition of photographs would have been an appendix to Ballester’s oeuvre only a decade ago. Today it provides an almost complete overview of his work. The main subject – and, no doubt, his approach to it – has not varied; what has changed is how he portrays it. The eye has taken over from the hand. Interestingly, Ballester’s photographs incorporate an element that he handles with caution when painting: colour. Whereas his finest paintings and prints are strictly black and white (which printmaking techniques explore and exploit to perfection), in his photographs it is black and white that are used with caution, colour being the salient feature. A certain number of photographs nonetheless capture misty scenes in which shades of grey are predominant, while Ballester’s fondness for night photography restores the primacy of deep black to his manner of showing the world.

One photograph contradicts this vision: a luminous picture of a nineteenthcentury dining room in which the table, draped in long tablecloths, is set for a banquet. All the decorative features contribute to the homely image the photographed room conveys: the walls, divided into compartments by fine white mouldings and painted light blue, hung with a whole host of small naturalistic paintings (still lifes and a calm family scene set in a dining room which echoes – or is a reminder of – what should go on in the room where the picture is), the heavy flowered curtains hung from rings threaded onto a gilt rod, the mirror with a carved frame, also gilt, the fireplace modestly covered by a oriental-style fire screen and the lit chandelier conjure up the ‘warmth of a home’ that is lived in. The image would be perfect, or accurate, creating the homely impression that is conjured up by all the objects, were it not for the fact that the room is a gallery in the Museo del Romanticismo in Madrid. Nobody lives or can live in it; it is merely a recreation through which the museum’s (few) visitors pass. The room is usually empty – and only holds a large number of people, never inhabitants, during group visits – and this emptiness is even more evident when we notice that the table is laid for a large family that does not and cannot exist. The photograph (Museo Romántico1) creates an illusion of life; but nobody can peep out from behind the image.

Most of Ballester’s photographs (digital or analogue), which are often large in size and similarly composed, portray what he describes as ‘urban landscapes’: views of cities, buildings and constructive ‘details’ which alternate with very occasional photographs of unspoilt landscapes – corresponding to fragments of nature set in urban contexts, preserved for the enjoyment of the city and already part of the citizen’s ‘mental landscape’ – or worked on by man to cater to basic urban needs.

The urban theme is not new. It belongs to tradition, a dual tradition even: architectural whims and idealised vedute. These are lesser genres in the classical tradition, as they give prominence to buildings – the backgrounds of history and religious painting – to the detriment of figures, which are absent or reduced to unsubstantial silhouettes that are above all indistinguishable from one another, faceless. Are Ballester’s photographs a lingering remnant or an updated version of the genre of classical architectural paintings that was developed from the seventeenth century and includes views of both real and ideal cities and buildings and existing or imaginary ruins – converting ruins into symbols of the fleetingness of life and of man’s incompetence or inability to transcend time, unlike divine creations? What, if any, is the relationship between Ballester’s art, pictorial or photographic, and this classical genre of painting?

The (apparent) absence of figures from Ballester’s works on architectural or city themes2relates them to the few known Renaissance paintings featuring ideal views of cities: buildings inspired by blocks and monuments that exist, could exist or could have existed, arranged on a ground or on terraces linked by short flights of stairs and covered in chequered marble with geometrical ornamental motifs with an imperial Roman feel about them. The buildings are arranged like the counters of a board game; medieval constructions are combined with Renaissance buildings, classical monuments – never ruins – and statues and freestanding columns. The ideal Renaissance city is empty. The galleon about to set sail from the harbour in the background, at which the whole city gazes, resembles a ghost ship. These ideal cities are not celestial cities as such. The buildings are not constructed of light or of translucent, brilliant or diamantine materials as in the biblical description – well known in the Renaissance – of celestial Jerusalem; rather, despite lacking in flaws or flaking, which would show that the constructions belong in time and are necessarily affected by it, they are material constructions similar to those found in Renaissance cities; built from heavy, albeit unblemished, materials. Indeed, they bear more of a resemblance to theatre sets, as there is no glimpse of an interior; there is no assurance that the façades are not merely backdrops. These cities – which are not cities but fantasies – are not and could not be inhabited. They never have been. Memories, traces of human presence are not perceived even though several of the constructions are or seem to be palaces and noblemen’s mansions and housing blocks. The dream consists of a silent and calm city which is not disturbed by the bustle, pace or impulse of life. The ideal city would bear more of a resemblance to a city of the dead was it not for the fact that it is home to nothing, not even the memory of the deceased – only emptiness; immutable cities, immune to the cycle of time; dematerialised cities; true dreams. One does not even have the feeling that they are the result of a laborious construction process, whose traces have been totally erased. The very history of the ideal city has been wiped out. They are cities without history or future; dehumanised cities.

Ballester also deals with nocturnal themes in his photographs. This might seem to account for the absence of people. But the darkness is offset by a theatrical or unreal lighting that converts the night into an impossible day: a day without apparent life. The picture of Brasilia by night (Nocturno en Brasilia) is thus significant. It is hard to know what it shows and when it was taken. In this case the title provides valuable information without which we would not know what we are looking at. The city is fully lit. But the absence of shadows – a detail that is common in Ballester’s photographs which, even when taken in daylight, he likes to set in grey or misty days, at dawn or nightfall (without playing with the easy effects created by the raking sunlight), causing the forms to be blurred and blended with shadows – the yellowish tones and electric greens of the grass, and the fact that the avenues, motorways and many roads and pedestrian crossings scattered with humdrum monolithic blocks are completely empty despite being so well lit that any shadowy secret spot shows up, raise a doubt: does the photograph show an impossible city or a model under unreal light? In this case the city is mistaken for – or reduced to – a model: a model of itself which can be expected to come to life when day dawns and it is again filled with people.

The cities and buildings Ballester portrays are empty like Renaissance ideal cities, but their emptiness conveys very different impressions.

The view of an imposing elongated room (Pasaje Rijksmuseum) whose row of groin vaults is supported by sturdy, plain stone columns in Amsterdam’s Rijkmuseum is significant. The floor of the hall has been completely taken up and removed to create a double space; the columns have had to be reinforced by a new structural steel framework that distributes the loads and rests on the floor below. The lower floor is covered in abandoned, twisted iron fittings, cables, pipes and left or forgotten items and earth, sand or cement under a glaucous light that is only interrupted by the floodlights that are commonly used on building sites. Ballester’s approach to this hall is similar to that taken in his view of the museum’s main courtyard portrayed in (Vestíbulo Principal 1 del Rijksmuseum). The paving of the courtyard, in the open air, is not perceptible as it is buried under a thick grey earthy layer furrowed by the tracks of large lorry wheels and dotted with puddles of muddy water in which the façades are reflected; it has obviously been lowered as the lower portion of the adjacent walls, hitherto hidden, is shown with its surface peeled to reveal a wearylooking bonding of bricks eaten away by splashes of lime and salts; of the pillars spaced along the façades, some are eroded, others reinforced and others still split open to be fitted with metal reinforcements. The façades are spoilt by a network of grey drainpipes and flashings possibly installed provisionally while the building work is in progress. A few windows are boarded up with planks of wood, as if it were an abandoned building. Shabby-looking movable metal stairs similar to those of aeroplanes provide access to the openings from the lowered courtyard floor. Wooden boards arranged willy-nilly prevent users from falling from the corridor that runs around the courtyard, converted into a moat, while the place is being refurbished. A simple earth ramp adds the final touch to the image of a space under construction. Ballester is fond of portraying the exposed bowels of buildings. Some are reduced to a tangled mass of reinforcing structures: he shows what is not normally seen, that which lies hidden supporting the construction – and defining the volumes – in the heart of the walls (La Reina de la noche 2, Torre TV Digital).

The cinema is the space – open or outdoor – par excellence where illusion takes place. Cinemas are always laid out like theatres: tiers of seating that face the stage, on or before which rises the screen (today it is sometimes supported by a simple wall, but the ground plan and structure of the theatre remain as they have been since the beginnings of film making: the space is split into two, at least virtually, with the profane area, for the public, separated by a virtual wall – the screen – which leads to the fictional space behind the glass).

Photographers such as Sugimoto have attempted to photograph the very space of the illusion or the plane that provides access to it, while others have settled for reflecting the Baroque or decadent ornamentation of 1920s and 1930s cinemas resembling opera houses. Ballester also focuses his camera on the audience (Cine en construcción), but what he shows is what there is beneath the gilt of the seating and the walls surrounding the spectators. Once again, we find a space laid bare; we are not sure if it is half-built or half-dismantled or demolished. It seems that the photograph cannot help bringing to mind the fragile framework – simple wooden ribs in a room whose walls are not very splendorous – that supports the camera where the miracle of cinema takes place.

The two photographs of interiors of La Tabacalera, the venue of the present exhibition (Tabacalera 1, Tabacalera 2), attest to Ballester’s fondness for buildings’ ramshackle material presence and their almost obscene – in their objectivity and dispassionateness – exposure (Ballester neither judges nor delves: he shows them from a distance, and this heightens the observer’s unease). The marks of time are not ignored: they are there and are exposed. They are shown in the foreground. The forms are wounded and exhibit their inner ribs, or the neglect they have suffered. The image stands in contrast to that of the ideal cities which are uncontaminated by dust and cannot be suspected of being made of mud and of returning to dust one day. The dusty floor of one of the large industrial buildings of La Tabacalera (Tabacalera 1) –bounded by walls that seem to have withstood a war as so many wounds have caused the paint to flake, and with a low, filthy wall from which countless bars and rolls of cable supporting unlit fluorescent tubes hang like useless vines – is smeared with a load of emptied and disembowelled cardboard boxes randomly left, whose logo in large letters that is patently visible on one of the sides, Fortuna, seems to be an ironic comment on the state of this time-ravished room.

The photograph Tabacalera 2 heightens the sensation of neglect that the group of pictures conveys. The rooms, whose walls are covered up to mid-height with aquamarine and dull dusky pink tiles – on which of a row of individual hospice-type hand basins is reflected – recall those of a hospital of the interwar years, a fact which lessens the impression of hospitality (and increases that of rejection or sadness). This impression is further heightened by the ailing ceiling whose flakes like festering shells are mounted on top of each other and by the doors ripped out of their metal frames – crowned by a sort of lobed pediment, an absurd decorative concession that remains in good condition amid the overall decrepitude and seems to symbolise the senselessness, vanity or uselessness of the shabby surroundings – with useless hinges through which seeps a dirty light, revealing the filth of the floor.

Museums and cinemas: spaces that ought to be in perfect condition for exhibiting or projecting works of art but which Ballester portrays as abandoned spaces that house only ruins and scrap. With nothing to exhibit, and with no visitors, the uselessness of these places is blatantly obvious.

Nocturno en el Rijksmuseum 2 shows an elongated room with a lantern vault. The room is in the dark. A door at the far end leads to an area which, in contrast, is well lit: that is all we discover about it. The room is empty. A mechanical platform lift on wheels, of the sort commonly used in museums to be able to handle the spotlights and large paintings hung at a certain height, is parked at one side, no doubt left there after a day’s work. A couple of folding chairs, a tin bucket, some carelessly placed wires, perhaps left over from some building work, dirt on the floor: the room is a far cry from its usual appearance. It is a space in transition or under preparation. Fondness for the temporary states of spaces is a constant feature in Ballester’s art. He rarely portrays them at their height of splendour, trapped in time; instead he shows uncertain stages in which it is not known if the place is being improved – and is therefore under preparation or restoration – or in decline.

The stress placed on the weight and passage of time refutes the idealness of the spaces which, on the contrary, Renaissance painting established. The matter that Ballester exposes, whether that which shapes the volumes or that which the decadent volumes are going to become – a formless mass, as if they were doomed organic entities – contrasts with, or refutes, the purity or perfection of the forms, and warns about the impossibility of escaping from time and the history that contemporary architecture aims and nearly always yearns for. In this regard Ballester’s photographs are a harsh warning about the excesses (of arrogance, maybe?) of buildings and cities nowadays. Matter always lies hidden, and is alive.

Even in cases where Ballester photographs buildings that are (apparently) finished, newly inhabited or yet to be officially opened, he still shows some feature that is alien to the construction and spoils the overall effect, or rather reminds the viewer of its recent construction, or that its completion is still uncertain or provisional. The wooden ladder – which should have been removed – leaning horizontally against the newly completed, immaculate wall of the museum designed by the architect Pei (Museo Suzhou 1) humanises the coldness of the construction and is a reminder that it is a human building, with its virtues and its flaws, and not a magically or mechanically materialised building. Behind its construction are human beings who have climbed, perhaps wearily or with difficulty, to a great height up a ladder without a handrail that was simply leant against the wall, no doubt without protection. The quasi-domestic nature of this instrument reinforces its incongruent presence in the courtyard of a grand public building. They are spaces under constant change that will never become permanent or attain the ideal state for which they were created.

This liking or this preference for the materiality of buildings – contrasting with their uselessness or the fact that they are shown as empty and perhaps useless shells, which renders the weight, the body they exhibit and its massive presence, meaningless: what is the point of their existence? – has sometimes led Ballester to focus his lens on a very specific area of a building: an unusual feat in this artist who usually prefers panoramic views, at least in this exhibition. MAN 18 shows a detail in a corner. The camera focuses on the lower part of the wall: the thick layer of plaster has flaked off or been removed – perhaps to open a channel – leaving the course of worn bricks exposed. The photograph gives the impression that it is a battered building. The shabby walls, flaking, stains and lack of a final coat of paint, in addition to the breakage in the lower part, denote the neglect of the building, which is nonetheless enlivened or its negligence alleviated by the beams of light that frame some interlaced elongated straight shadows possibly projected by a guide rail light or a crane. The photograph does not conceal the shabby details, but shows them in such a way that they preserve their dignity. Ballester does not delve into sordidness. But nor does he idealise. He exposes details that we do not notice or that we would not want to see and which sully the ideal – we might say official – image which is the one that is usually promoted. Empty architectures are certainly not ideal architectures. Yet his approach contrasts with his fondness for the dust and decrepitness that burden or weigh down the buildings. On the one hand, the details shown or the moment chosen to depict these places that ought to be in perfect condition reveal the machinery that underpins the illusion of these cities and contemporary buildings, in which nobody is seen, perhaps because they are invisible. However the composition, or the focus, moves away what had previously been brought forward (to discover what is not usually shown). And so, to the unreality of these constructions is added their fallacy, how they deceive those who live in or come near them.

Indeed, Ballester nearly always chooses a viewpoint from which a perfectly frontal and symmetric view is obtained. This perspective representation – habitually a forced perspective – often focuses on an area in which there is an open door through which the spectator’s sight would slip were it not for the violent contrast of light between the scene in the foreground and the space behind the background plane (Nocturno en el Rijkmuseum 2, Pasaje Rikjmuseum and even La Reina de la noche 2, for example). It is a device that Ballester has employed on more than one occasion (Túnel rojo, Pasillo de hotel, Entrada al museo – in which a screen replaces the arc of light in the background – not included in this exhibition, etc.: the very titles suggest what the photographs focus on) and which he combines with doors left ajar, narrow paths and passageways leading off to who knows where that provide a glimpse of what is located or going on behind, without revealing it clearly.

The absence of human figures from all these images – certainly from all those chosen for the exhibition – prevents us from gauging the size of the spaces. In addition to the impossibility of taking the exact measurements of the spaces represented in perspective – which, far from providing an objective image of reality, deform it, at least partly – the lack of figures prevents us from ascertaining the proportions of the spaces and how they relate to human beings. Photographs like Interior Congreso and Interior Congreso 2, in which all that is seen is a forced perspective, perhaps from a low or very low viewpoint, of a long room or walkway, do not allow us to gauge whether we are dealing with a corridor that can be crossed on foot or a walkway in a scale model. What size are the busts on either side of the corridor? Are they life size, monumental or pinheads? These uncertainties add to the distance between the viewer and the image which the perspective establishes. In a sense these views are ideal representations or depictions of ideal spaces in that they are unattainable.

These majestic and exact central perspectives in which the foreground is dominated by structures or arches that hover over the viewer – Cubierta, Palacio de Congresos, Interior de Congreso – and extend before the eyes, and in which the vanishing point is in the centre of the composition, cause a dual effect: on the one hand they entice the spectator, bring him face to face with the scene and force him to gaze at it; but at the same time, they move the interior or the building away, they keep it at a certain distance. It seems close, but recedes. It is always further away than the foreground, which constitutes a barrier. This effect is even stranger in that the spectator initially has the feeling of being able to explore the space that opens out before him visually or physically. The picture plane acts as a screen. What it shows is not projected on it, but springs from it. It is lost behind the space. The viewer comes up against a flat, reflecting plane over and over again – the methacrylate coating of the photographic paper heightens the sensation of a false closeness that the images create. They are truly cold planes. Everything that can occur, and can barely be made out, is behind the screen or a window. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ballester has portrayed so many windows, almost as many as he has open doors, at the far end of a room, looking out onto to that which can be sensed but not clearly perceived – owing to the blinding clarity that is seen through the frame of the opening: Ventanal Lasar Segall, Nocturno Beyeler.

But not all the views portray imperfections. In some cases the building or city is displayed newly completed with no recognisable flaws or vagueness (Fachada verde, albeit with a constant feature in the art of Ballester: the damp and soft light of grey days). This type of approach is not unusual in Ballester. It is found in other photographs – not included in this exhibition – such as the whole series of Espacios in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caja Burgos, made in 2003. In these cases, in particular, the notable feature is not the theme or approach but rather the unusual proportions of the photographs: exaggeratedly horizontal images; they are almost a horizon line. The height of these photographs, a few dozen centimetres, pales in comparison to their.

width of several metres. But these proportions are not gratuitous. They are perfectly adapted to those of the building or urban scene that is reproduced; relatively low buildings only one or a few storeys high which, in contrast, extend sideways. These buildings resemble city walls. The proportions of the theme or subject portrayed – for example, a public building – are the same as those of the photograph. The building takes up the whole surface of the photograph. There is scarcely any room for space or air – a narrow strip of sky that surrounds or constricts the volume – around the building. Furthermore, Ballester maintains the frontal view. That way the viewer sees only one side of the construction. It is reduced to one façade, becoming a plane; a plane that then coincides with the representative plane. The type of representation and the relation between theme and support thus convert the former – a naturalist theme – into an ‘abstract’ or geometrical motif. The building thus becomes a geometrical figure: a horizontal rectangle – or a vertical one, as in the case of the Congress building in Brasilia, whose photograph encloses the two towers in a vertical rectangle that almost blends with the side façades of both towers. The photograph thus metamorphoses a building into an ideal or model construction, sacrificing its corporeity: the building is transformed into a geometrical figure that is almost compressed into the picture plane. The problem of the possible difference between a geometrical figure (ideal) and its formal or material representation, which Plato already addressed, receives an almost ironic comment here. Captivating public and landmark buildings such as the towers of the Congress building in Brasilia can fit under your arm. The pattern of the architectural motif, the composition of the façade, becomes a geometrical pattern on a plane. The building almost vanishes, or once again is reduced to an underlying organisational geometrical outline, a set of lines and planes in which or among which there is logically no place for life. These images are really images of ideal architectures: unliveable.

Buildings and cities are, in principle, planned and constructed for human beings. To an extent their size must be adapted to the measurements and expectations of these humans. That the inhabitants or visitors are not physically present does not mean they have not been taken into account. Built spaces have a function; they are at the service of men, whether or not they dwell in them; even ruins bring to mind a past or lost human presence. And palaces cannot be understood unless we consider for whom they were intended. Temples, on the contrary, were designed and built for natural beings, but palaces were and are a creation, a human invention. It might almost be said that the presence of human figures is not really necessary, except to gauge spaces. In a sense, it is taken for granted that the spaces which man builds (for himself) exist for beings who are the same as those who observe the images.

This play of actual presences and latent presences which Ballester creates has recently been given a new twist. The recent and unfinished series Espacios Ocultos, which to date consists of fifteen photographs of very different size (the smallest measures barely 50x50 cm, whereas the latest and the largest is nearly nine metres long), features photographs of famous paintings of classical and oriental art, from Giotto to Picasso.

However, these images do not simply reproduce paintings (or even canonical photographs) in the manner of Appropriation art, but aim to reveal an unknown – impossible to observe – aspect of the original work that is reproduced.

José Manuel Ballester takes away the figures. Aside from the laborious procedure and the virtuosity shown in filling in the empty outlines – using digital and manual methods: paint and pixels – the photographs acquire an appearance that, although foreseeable, is no less unexpected.

The chosen works could be said to belong to the canon of art, chiefly western pictorial (or the art of image): Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Christ on the Cross, Vermeer’s Allegory of Painting, Goya’s The Third of May 1808. The Executions on Príncipe de Pío Hill and Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa,³ among others.

They are all history paintings. They belong to the painting genre that was considered superior and was only within the reach of – and could only be practiced by – masters. These paintings are characterised by the dominant presence of figures, depicted singly or in groups. The rest of the picture, which was often completed by assistants, features landscapes, still life, etc. – anecdotal scenes that sometimes reinforced the ‘message’ conveyed by the actions represented (or experienced), symbolised or viewed by the figures, in a manner easily understood by the illiterate and sometimes distracted attention from the main action, and content.

In Ballester’s photographs the figures have disappeared and we are apparently left with genre paintings: still-life scenes, landscapes, architectural caprices albeit of a size more characteristic of history (or religious) painting.

We thus discover an unimaginable facet or aspect of the painting – and of the art or artistic period to which the painting belongs; its truth is suddenly revealed. The scaffolding of the figures camouflaged what the painting could convey and the artist’s abilities. In paintings such as Goya’s The Third of May 1808, the absence of figures is barely noticeable; this is surprising, as the pathos and horror of the people executed or about to be executed and the cold, mechanical violence embodied by the soldiers is almost unbearable. The original work calls for silence. Ballester reveals to us that horror and fear are part of the landscape and of the scene: all the emotions the painting can convey or reflect are already in the hills which wear down like brown waves, and in the absurdly lit and abandoned street lamp in the outskirts of a huddled city. The figures could be said to be almost redundant. What they express is echoed in the surrounding scenery which amplifies the horror, as if it could only be shown so obscenely in this setting. Nature itself is terrorised.

In the version of Vermeer’s painting, the figures are still there. They have been eliminated but their invisible yet perceptible trace remains. The picture has been populated with ghosts. The figures have gone but something murky and unsettling hovers there. The picture in which the painter made a portrait remains on the easel; the half-painted figure has ceased to be the half-blurred image of the person who was sitting for it and has been transformed into a realistic, and therefore evanescent and vague, likeness of a phantasmagorical apparition that can only be recorded in the picture on the easel, as if a magic mirror. The scene seems to portray the work of an invisible painter, one from the beyond. The photograph, which ought to show a Dutch interior documented in minute detail, suddenly converts an image, initially taken from prosaic reality, into an image in which reality is mixed with the unreal, or the supernatural (though this is not so odd, as Vermeer never merely documented what was around him).

It so happens that whereas the paintings show figures in everyday settings, this strange, unsettling impression caused by the scarcely sensed proximity of the supernatural is not evident at first sight. Once again, Ballester’s photography reveals the ‘truth’ of Vermeer’s painting just as he had succeeded in doing with that of Goya.

Could there possibly be a more ‘legible’ or ‘interpretable’ picture than Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus?: the Greek myth clearly illustrated. There is nothing missing and nothing superfluous: the choppy sea, the shell, the icy figure of Venus (according to the neo-Platonic conceptist notion), the coast off the island of Cyprus, the gods of the winds and the personification of time who, by clothing her, will humanise or give body, flesh, to the celestial Venus – all the elements that make up the tragic myth that tells of the origin of the goddess of war and of desire are present, painted in minute detail. Each wave, each leaf, each embroidered motif is carefully depicted as in a Persian miniature. One might say that, despite the size of the painting, Botticelli’s painstaking painting reduces the grandiose cosmic gust of wind that brings the wounding beauty to earth, whatever it takes. But in Ballester’s photograph the empty shell at once appears as hard as a claw. It resembles a strange sea monster that looks as if it might be abandoned or lying in wait for its prey. Above it the sea and sky are ominously empty, and at the same time immutable. The horror concealed by the pale flesh-that-is-not-flesh of the Celestial Venus is revealed. What Venus brings is absolute emptiness. The celestial Venus is blinding. No thing or person can come near her. Her presence cleaves a cosmic gap. The whole painting, which is transformed when the figures are removed, is the image of unfathomable emptiness despite the pleasant coastline and the forest. The scene is chilling, and effectively translates the icy – and deceptive – hieratical appearance of the Venus who has descended from above, or emerged from the waters.

The disappearance of Jesus and the Apostles from The Last Supper, based on the Milanese fresco by Leonardo de Vinci, heightens the tragic feeling of the scene, which Leonardo’s work perhaps concealed or attenuated. It is evident that a meal has been eaten. The table is not laid for a banquet; rather, what is shown is the remains of a banquet. The room has been vacated. The image is somewhat unsettling even to anyone unfamiliar with the life of Jesus Christ. One senses that something serious has happened which has forced the diners to come away from the long table, perhaps hastily. The table is arranged parallel to the picture plane, in a high room: it is a solemn table irrespective of the delights of the feast; a table that has not been left in a natural or logical manner. One senses that the reason, unknown to those not familiar with the Gospel, is worrying. The solitude of the room might symbolise – the Espacios Ocultos conjure up symbolic images – the absolute solitude of the man who presided at the supper, abandoned by everyone. This table is very different from the view of the Museo Romántico (the comparison is made by Ballester himself): there the table, neatly and immaculately laid, awaits the guests in vain. It is only a set. Here, in contrast, the communion has taken place. And it has ended badly or hurriedly. The sacrifice which the supper symbolised becomes even more obvious, pathetic or pointless.

It might thus be argued then that the figures Ballester removes from the pictures are unnecessary. Or rather that they are necessary but not to illustrate the history they relate but to tell a story (a fiction) about the truth to which they allude. The figures soften the painful truth that classical painting attains. Beneath the veil of fiction, it tells of the horror of life subjected to the whims of the gods and the cruelty of men. In a sense Ballester, silencing the seduction of the figures, reveals what the pictures say and do not say, what they camouflage so as not to tell the truth directly or to deceive about the truth.

The disfigured paintings from which the figures have vanished can no longer conceal what they contain or show. And what is revealed is frightening.

Lo que queda tras la eliminación de las figuras –Ballester procede a un verdadero sacrificio: el sacrificio de la imagen, para revelar la verdad; va más allá de la imagen, cruza el espejo para descubrir lo que, quizá, el brillo de la imagen no deja ver– es un fondo que dice lo que las figuras deberían contar pero no lo hacen o no pueden: desnuda las historias de sus figuras. Solo queda entonces un escenario vacío, que pone en evidencia, literalmente, las ausencias –como también acontecía en la prodigiosa serie de óleos y grabados dedicados a camas deshechas y dejadas en hoteles anónimos–. De nuevo, en esta serie de fotografías dedicadas al tríptico de Botticelli, son las figuras (vivas, que no fantasmagóricas) ausentes las que narran la verdadera historia.

The Espacios Ocultos raise questions about the relation between reality and what is represented. Ballester is fond of three Annunciations by Giotto, Fra Angelico and Leonardo de Vinci, which he interprets as three manners, profane or earthly, mystic and intellectual, of addressing the theme. However, the point is not a commentary on these Renaissance works but Ballester’s interpretation. The Annunciation is a central theme both in Christian mythology and in art. It is a verbal representation of what is going to happen. The event consists of the materialisation of the spirit. A fully symbolic or artistic theme, given that the work of art gives form to an idea, a mental image or an intuition. It makes the invisible visible. The representation of the Annunciation in art shows the moment when the unheard-of is conceived in the double sense of the word: both thought and made flesh. The idea is hatched and implemented. Ballester’s interpretation of the theme of the Annunciation shows… nothing. The setting is empty. The photograph shows the place where the Annunciation took place or will take place – which is impossible, as the Annunciation is unforeseeable: it cannot be anticipated, as if this occurred it would cease to be a true Annunciation. An announcement cannot be announced. Its revolutionary nature loses all its force if it becomes known what will happen. Therefore, Ballester addresses the theme of the Annunciation, not its setting – which would of course be impossible: the setting of the Annunciation requires the representation of the latter – it must take ‘place’; but Ballester ‘shows’ that there is nobody in the scene. The angel Gabriel and Mary are not there (they are not in the setting, nor do they meet). As the Annunciation proclaims the forthcoming and inevitable materialisation or visualisation of the invisible (the spirit), it has to be visible. The spirit sends a messenger, who appears, shows himself. If nobody is personified, the Annunciation cannot take place, there is no room for it. Neither the messenger nor the spirit becomes incarnate. Furthermore, Mary ceases to be a human and becomes an invisible power (something which has always been a latent temptation in Christianity). What Ballester shows is the impossibility of the Annunciation: nothing is announced, at least nothing visible – but the Annunciation is visible proof of what cannot be shown, or what cannot be seen. Furthermore, these works denounce the assumed ability of pictorial art to capture the invisible: the founding event of art, the incarnation – that is, the fusion of spirit and flesh (matter) – does not take place or is invisible, at least to pictorial art. It fails to capture and give meaning to the paradigm of visualisation. Pictorial art thus proves itself to be powerless or useless. It is no longer the place where the invisible is shown, leaving a clear trace on the canvas, paper, the material support. These ‘Annunciations’ highlight art’s inability to embody an idea: it is the end of art. The fact that the Annunciation does not take place, perhaps because it is meaningless or useless, indicates that pictorial art is dispensable. It now lacks ‘meaning’. Its mission is over. It is a procedure that has been exhausted. A terrible but logical conclusion that explains well why the age-old art of images has reached its end. It is no longer of use in revealing the world.

Everything claimed until then seems to crumble in the version of Botticelli’s triptych dealing with the terrible story of Nastagio degli Onesti: a young woman who has rejected her suitor, who commits suicide, is persecuted for life, for all time, by the spurned lover. As in the myth of Sisyphus, he runs after her, chases her, kills and quarters her over and over again. The murdered young woman is reborn only to suffer the same torment. The chase takes place in a forest. Ballester uses the same procedure as in the rest of the series of Espacios Ocultos. He erases the figures. All that remains is the forest, and the city has a lake in the distance. But in this case the absence of the figures is not noticed. The forest does not appear to need them. No trace remains of the tragic presence of the lovers. Only a few felled trees perhaps indicate that a violent incident took place.

But logically the young people cannot leave any trace. They do not exist. They are only ghosts. Perhaps they are even only a dream or a nightmare. What Ballester succeeds in doing is highlighting the prodigious talent of Botticelli, who perfectly captured what spectres are and what causes them. They are nothing and are not the origin of anything. They are the antithesis of the figures of the Annunciation, as the latter are necessary to give meaning to the scene: in contrast, in this case the forest is indifferent, as if nothing had happened, following the disappearance of the phantasmagorical figures. They were air or mist, and were not at all disturbing. The landscape recovers its hieratical placidness after the passage and disappearance of the shadows, a calm it has never lost. Ghosts cannot upset reality.

The triptych is complete with a third image: and in this one the spectator does perceive an absence, and a tragedy is sensed. Nastagio is a spurned young man, but not the young man described above who chases after his loved one following her death. After being abandoned, Nastagio goes deep into a forest, where he has the vision. On returning, he throws a banquet amid the trees in honour of his disdainful fiancée. The phantasmagorical persecution occurs inevitably, in the middle of the ceremony. The guests flee in terror. What remains is the long laid table with the scattered remains of a banquet which, one senses, has ended badly (how many failed banquets that seal agreements between equals and coexistences do we see in the Espacios Ocultos, as if they revealed truths that we conceal or that should be concealed!). The contrast between the indolence of the trees and the scattered dinner service indicate only too well, without the need for figures, the tragic revelation. Nastagio’s fiancée has understood what has happened; she has realised what she has done. And she could not bear the truth. Ballester’s version heightens the pathos of the story and its crudity, by stealing the figures and allowing the setting to tell of what has happened: the revelation of horror.

What remains after the figures are eliminated – Ballester makes a true sacrifice: the sacrifice of the image, to reveal the truth; he goes beyond the image and crosses through to the other side of the mirror to discover what is perhaps obscured by the glare of the image – a background that states what the figures should tell but do not or cannot: he strips the stories of their figures. All that remains is an empty stage, which literally evidences the absences – as also occurs in the prodigious series of oil paintings and prints of unmade beds left in anonymous hotels. Once again, in this series of photographs on Botticelli’s triptych it is the absent figures (living, not phantasmagorical) that tell the true story.

The work that perhaps best reflects or sums up Ballester’s conception of the human habitat – and is not included in the present exhibition – is unique in his oeuvre. It is a video entitled Calle sin fin. It lasts more than six minutes. Perhaps the title suggests what it shows: a view of a pedestrian crossing in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou taken on a grey day, perhaps with a fixed camera; a constant stream of cars, cyclists and pedestrians without beginning or end, without rhyme or reason. The footage is forced and purposely out of focus. It begins with some uncertain, blurry dots of light dancing over a dark background. Human beings simply file past. They are indistinguishable, unrecognisable. Nearly all of them are converted into shapeless shadows. Their faces are not visible. The streets are also anonymous. The movement is mechanical, but unceasing. From time to time a vehicle seems to go against the current. The directions of all the streets are not clear. Some small identical cars – same shape, same colour – possibly taxis, go past by time and time again, unpredictably. It appears to be the same car, trapped in time, or space. The action ends in the same way that it has begun. No story can be made out. It is not possible to work out where the streets are, what day or time it is, although we sense that the movement will continue in the same way every day. We only perceive the uncertain filing past of beings and vehicles, out of step with each other. The composition is attractive. But one senses that it expresses some conception of urban life that is intentionally not clearly stated. The work can be viewed in two ways or meets two types of expectations: that of those who take pleasure in form and that of those who seek messages or meanings in or behind it. Ballester never confirms or denies. He allows spectators to piece together a story and wants to see what they can get – if they get an idea – out of the image. It pleases and unsettles. It is almost irritating for the impossibility of arriving at a single – and clear and evident – content. The image does not allow this. And it needs to be viewed over and over again, although it keeps an ace up its sleeve. The life it portrays is complex and, possibly, contradictory, even though – or because – it aspires to idealness.

This exhibition, which marks the award of the National Prize for Photography – and is held in a venue, Tabacalera, that could almost have been imagined by Ballester – is an excellent chance to view again the many layers that make up Ballester’s apparently pleasant or simply dazzling works. Underlying them is an obscure background which is a good reflection of modern life and its sense. Or senselessness.