Photomed - Comme le temps passe / How Time Flies

From his training as a classical painter Spanish photographer Ferran Freixa has kept a taste for frontality and compositional balance and an intuition for qualities of light. This classicism is tempered by a genuine sensitivity, particularly to the fragility of things. What Ferran Freixa wants to capture is the passage of time when he photographs the ruins it leaves behind. His images show abandoned places and the slow, inexorable process by which nature reclaims them, be they old luxury hotels or industrial buildings. The pictures are sometimes tightly framed, emphasising the interplay of lines and shapes, and sometimes show broader views reminiscent of the rhetoric of painting, such as the sculpture of a child fallen into a pond, which seems to be gently sinking into the calm waters of Poussin’s The Flood.

The subject of decrepitude and ruina is once again tackled in the series devoted to the Liceu theatre in Barcelona. We are in 1994, and the theatre has just burnt down. Although access was prohibited, Ferran Freixa managed to obtain special permission to photograph the charred remains of the building. “I knew that every image was unique, because the next day it would no longer exist”, he said. A simple sentence that sheds light on the basis of his approach: what drives him is less morbid fascination than the desire to keep a record: a fragile testimony to what used to be.

The exhibition is produced by the Art Center Tecla Sala, Barcelona.