It is unusual being able to contemplate the personal universe of a photographer during an exhibition or having the possibility of seeing his evolution, his deviations and his passions through time.

 

Vari Caramés makes it easy for us in his last exhibition at the Raíña Lupa Gallery.

 

 

If he gives us a visit to Barcelona, where he has taken 8 years to come back, he does it by recomposing his photographic universe in the gallery itself. 

 

He builds us this universe from the union of pieces, memories and fetishisms that were, are, and will be, those images materialised on paper, and that have been matured by time. Reflected on paper, and never on just any paper, the course of “his life” has given them the value that only time can add.

 

His photographs, that for many resemble the noble arto f Hay ku, are the ones that create a compact universe with their cloudy look. A universe that leaves us an infinity of possible interpretations, of parallel stories, of happy and unhappy endings.

 

Vari explains it this way: “It will seem as if they were always here, the pictures”.

 

Caramés has the power of preserving with his camera those images, of confused limits, in which shadows come to life and show us another world. Images that tell us something more than the obvious and that we can only maintain in our retina for a few instants, and that he “hunts” to make them re-emerge from our dreams. Photographs from the nothing and the everything that make us forget that they are only a view of the world, because they are all the views at the same time.

 

That lack of light, or the excess of it, the continuous movement of life, the diffuse shapes and the mass over the line, give to the images an almost materialistic plasticity. They give us the impulse to come closer and tempt us to touch to notice the volumen, cross boundaries, submerge in the water, the air, the time.

 

The photograph always presents an instant frozen in time, making us forget its way, brief but relentless. Vari has humanised them by making them “live”, letting them grow old, endarken by light, get stressed by the time that passes. The has kept them as the fetishes of life, put together as a puzzle by the shapes, themes and passions. And he has look for a home, a wall, a corner… so that they can keep being what their are: an essential part of our lives.

 

In this peculiar way, he takes the gallery as an extension of his own studio, how he conceives and places the photographs on the walls; as if it were a “cabinet of curiosities”. Gathering them for their own history and inviting us to sneak between them while we enter into his world.