© José Guerrero. VEGAP, Madrid, 2022
COLLECTIONS CATALOG
Studying the concept of place is one of the key aspects of José Guerrero’s work. His photographs are usually made in series exploring the particularities of a specific location from successive points of view with a wide range of details and motifs. This is the case of the series Thames in which the author compiles a series of images from his unique exploration of the river that flows through London using fog as the work’s formal and thematic axes. The series is an in-depth view of the great metropolis—which is barely visible—taken from what used to be its main access point; one which has now become the misty counterpart of a past whose vestiges emerge and seem to question their history.
In José Guerrero’s inquiry into place, and in the set of images that make up his entire body of work, there is a simultaneous play on space. This becomes apparent in his composition, his use of perspective, and in his attention to light and its different hues; a formal exploration that is manifested throughout his career and lies somewhere between documentary registry and the attraction to abstract nudity. In the case of Thames it is subordinated to the true core of the series: the material axis of fog and the treatment of its expressive and symbolic values, from the oneiric to the phantasmagorical.