Gabriel Lacomba: meditations about the photographical process

year: 2000.

authors: Maria Josep Mulet .

This text was written with regard to the exhibition somatranslucid 93/00.

EXTRAT:

The latter creation of Gabriel Lacomba are compositions about photosensitive material, based on antropomorphic, zoomorphic, vegetal and geometrical motives, and in abstract and gestual outlines.We can find the human body, the cross, the Nature and the manufactured world. They are regular structures, rectangled shaped on generous dimensions, and irregular structures, small sized, performing geometrical and sometimes enormous compositions.

We have still not said that we are speaking about photographs. They are performed with the basic tools of the photographical process; camera, light, emulsioned support. The author takes the photographical medium as a starting point, to get unusual and not very conventional results. It means to reach the very first roots of the medium to create, immediately, a new dialectic, far away from what is properly understood as Photography. Obviously, he does not provoke a crisis in the visual language, but in the tradition representative. He does not doubt about the medium, he just refuses what was set up in 1839, when Photography was presented in Paris as a very new invention of the Industrial Revolution and the Positivism. What Lacomba proposes is to get another view-point against what is commonly known as Photography: literary recreation, pure documentalism, decisive moments…

Works of Lacomba are situated on the frontier, by means of the polemics of what is able to be photographic or what is not to affirm through the images what is photographic has no frontiers. What he does is to weigh the anchor from the essence of the photographic image, just to split and to expand the medium, opening it to new horizons. We must say that his work has historical antecedents, for example looking back to the first avantgardes, particularly the Christian Schad's work and the experiences of Man Ray, Raoul Hausmann, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy, to name some of the most representative authors of the photogram and the abstract photography.