Girls, desires and fiction / Paradises

31.1.2008 – 15.3.2008

Girls, desires and fiction / Paradises is the first solo show in Israel for Carmela Garcia, a prominent artist in the Spanish art world. In her solo show Girls, desires and fiction / Paradises Carmela Garcia exhibits 11 large photographs, showing us both the urban space and a development of an Arcadian, Idealist photographic language through a series of intimate, pictorial and occasionally romantic photographs. In a wide range that demonstrates her versatility, from forests to lakes, from mountains and islets, from cliffs to giant Palm trees and from Urban deck to inner studio space Garcia situates women in them and next to them to measure her up to them, so that the woman becomes her surrounding’s conscience more then its extension.

The photograph’s eroticism is not always lesbian yet it obviously belongs to that space among women. Carmela Garcia’s work neither touches on nor focuses on this theme directly, though it does convey discernment to it, questioning and challenging it. Garcia’s work has no political agenda or biographical and existential intentions. Though it could be argued that the subjects of her photographs draw on and involve discourses related to questions of identity and gender, her fictions and fantasies always unfold as representations of desire and pleasure rather than documentary, evidential artifacts or ideological projections. Formally rigorous, perceptive, sceptical of grandiose statement and yet always beautiful, suggestive and often mysterious, Carmela Garcia’s work convey a progressive exploration of the ‘woman’s’ world.

The photographic language of Carmela Garcia expends the borders of photographic practice when it shakes the dust of the knowing smile of the viewer and reminds us that the photograph is an artistic scheme, fictional and not a representation of reality. The work is a narrative, a poetic construct. The images that Carmela Garcia presents us contain a story of the possible that exist only in the work itself.

Carmela Garcia exhibits since 1999, her works have been acquired for private collections as well as important photography centers and art museums in western Europe such as Musac in Leon, the Espacio Uno in the Queen Sophia museum in Madrid and in the far east in Shanghai and Japan.