The photographs of Manuel Vilariño (A Coruña, 1952), winner of the Spanish National Photography Award 2007, can be understood as an unceasing revival of what is on the frontier of life. His images often tell us about the mutations undergone by a substance that flutters with the impulse of a dynamic force that dominates it in its trembling vivacity. His work is an ode of the living present, of the fight between past and future. Vilariño’s snapshots, charged with intense philosophical sense, live in an unclassifiable world of loneliness and silence and persist regardless of generations or trends. The Galician artist presents his latest works at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, works especially conceived for this exhibition and curated by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego:
In the calm, inner luminosity of Outside Sea, the indecisive, melting moment breaks—just like one of his portrayed blows of arctic ice—and, at the same time, irreparably, it moves away from us. This is the way in which nature (the sea and the sky), opens itself to us in the landscapes presented by the Galician photographer: a beach, a mountain with velvety black lava in Northern Europe, frozen rocks and the Pole’s icebergs. As if the gaze concealed the trembling of a flying butterfly. This was already very much present in his series of beautiful winged shadows, some of which can also be found in this show, but this time it asserts itself as essential poetics. A place where the photographer, who is a poet, would like to give a name to the pure quality of what is most elemental and archaic: the sea, a mountain, a fragment of lava, sand or fire.
Vilariño thus suggests a form of approximation that participates at the same time in the distancing game. His poetics is shaped by the game of distance and closeness. The dimension of the photographic image has always been for Vilariño a sphere for meditation, but his latest exhibition, which combines large-format black and white and colour photographs with light boxes, the gaze opens up to the elemental spaces in a specially slow manner, belatedly gathering up each and every one of the radiant particles of what is illuminated in its living essence and takes place in the thickness of a propagation behind darkness.