Chema Madoz (Photobolsillo)

The truth is that Madoz has known how to photographically deposit his metamorphic visions and unique object games, endowing the final image with an “enigmatic” tone because of his systematic use of black and white.

A Madoz photograph from the mid 1980s shows some guy wearing a raincoat covered with large stains that seem to prolong themselves in the spots on the wall behind him. We can only see the subject’s clothing; his hands are in his pockets and his face is outside the field of view, avoiding identification and any slip into the portrait genre. Chema Madoz wanted to punctuate the occurrence and emphasise the irony that to some extent is part of things. The work of this extraordinary artist contains a sort of smiling poetry in which objects enter into relations that are not so much absurd as a unique encoding, which could be understood by naming figures of speech such as metaphors or metonyms.

At times, he establishes a specific functional reiteration, inserting the keyhole in the top of a key or converting a walking stick into a banister. Other times, his composition contains very dense symbolism – a clock embedded in a coffin (time corrodes everything, the certainty that each instant brings us closer to the end) or else plays very delicately with similarities – the grain of the wood is transformed into a match flame. He also tends toward the heterogeneity of the imaginary with surrealist notes (votive candles as typewriter keys).