architecture – Mind's Eye

Nacho Gómez Sales

April 18 – May 26, 2024

Opening : Thursday April 25

6pm – 10pm

in presence of the photographer

NACHO GÓMEZ SALES

Born in Castellón de la Plana, Spain, Ignacio “Nacho” Gómez Sales studied photography at the EASD in Valencia and the EASD Serra i Abella in Barcelona. He then went on to specialize in architectural photography at the IEFC in Barcelona.
In 2008, he left Barcelona and moved to Dijon, where he completed an internship at the Côte-d’Or’s Architecture, Environment and Town Planning Council (CAUE21).
He settled permanently in Paris in 2009, where he has lived and worked ever since. Between 2010 and 2013, he completed a Master of Fine Arts specialising in Photography and Contemporary Art at Paris 8 University.
In 2017, his series on South Korea was selected in “Descubrimientos Photoespaña” in Madrid.
In 2018 he made a self-edited book entitled London.
Since 2002, he has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions, notably in Castellon and Barcelona, but also in Paris, Orense and Gandia, as well as in specialised photography media.
Since 2009, he has been combining photography with his work at the Centre Pompidou bookshop.

PRÉSENCES

When I take photographs, I try to ensure that my images help to analyse the configuration of the space represented, its genealogy, and the use made of it by those who live there and those who have lived there. On the other hand, alongside this analytical aspect, there is an irrational aspect in my work. I choose places that somehow appeal to me not just for what they are, but for what they have been, for what is real and ghostly about them, for how their past is, at the same time, present, like wrinkles in the skin. As Italo Calvino says in Invisible Cities, the city is made up of the relationship between the measurements of its space and the events of its past. As if this space harboured a strange presence, and photography was the medium that transcribed it. Therein lies the interest for me in photographing places.

The photographs in this exhibition, taken in France, Spain and Italy between 2005 and 2019, are divided into two sections. In the first part, we essentially find traces. Ruins and city walls create an echo between a latent past and an ongoing present. Just as light and time work on the surface of photographic film, a kind of memory is also recorded in these stone and concrete surfaces, whose juxtaposition is an array of temporary layers, to which urban gardens and plants growing wild alongside constructions are sometimes invited.

In the second part, daylight has departed, and we find ourselves at night, that temporary space where people sleep, and which in popular culture is always linked, among other things, to the unknown, danger and ghost stories. Even if electric lighting in modern cities no longer leaves room for total darkness, the dim light that bathes surfaces modifies them, changing their colours and shapes. A banal, everyday object can thus become an enigmatic, mysterious object. These photographs take us on a nocturnal stroll through a city without inhabitants, where urban elements such as trees, doors, windows and railings are the sole protagonists. The photographs were taken with tripod and long exposures, in some cases transforming the darkness of night into the light of day.

Nacho Gómez Sales