Alberto García Alix

The eight photographs featured at the Centro Cultural Español are not the photographer’s best-known or most iconic works. They are large format images − impeccably printed on barite paper − in which a self-portrait or a portrait is followed by a landscape, in the manner of a face with a non-place. In this way, the landscape is gradually humanized, associating urban places with affective spaces, holding a dialogue about the path that is none other than that of life itself. These photographs are the prelude for the exhibition’s main attraction: an audiovisual piece − that lends its title to the show − in which the most important element of García Alix’s body of work is revealed to us: the look on his own visual history which subjectively describes his personal life and his relationship with photography as a medium, guided by the artist’s own voice off camera.
In the forty minutes of the video’s duration, we hypnotically tour his early and current work, lulled by the husky voice of García Alix as he lays bare and weaves stories of his own history, his soul, or as he himself points out, “the solitude of my deliria”. Perhaps what is most relevant in this piece is the brilliant manifesto on autobiography and the photographic act that it puts forward. The story in the audiovisual presentation begins with the death of his brother and from that point on, it unravels the loneliness of the road, the presences left by death, photographs that speak of absences, these narratives contributing to the construction of a more poetic body of work, which also includes a dissertation on death in which the artist holds a dialogue with himself in some shots of his face captured in motion and those of a statue of Mao, his interlocutor.
García Alix points out that “Photography links my memories. It does not only restrict them to what I have seen. The melancholic emotion of the unimpeachable becomes visible. Encounter is the soul of photography. If yesterday I photographed silences, today I photograph my own voice…” The artist refers to photography as a process of internal and personal work, the exorcism of one’s own ghosts, almost a way of freeing oneself from psychoanalysis. Photography is put forward as the permanent exercise of the gaze as if looking through the eyes of a toy, as testimony of the fragmentation of time, and as a constructed truth, “…watching the photograph is like living the same experience twice…”
In this work, García Alix elaborates a spatial-temporal discourse in which the video’s narrative explores chapters and affections in his life, looking back and ahead, with interludes of Macbethian hallucinations. The photographer is photographed; his path has been, if you will, the most difficult, in his attempt to starkly record that which will be lost: life. Blood, always present, parades invisibly amidst syringes, in the same way that the faces of those he portrays, isolated, also mingle, invisible, among the phantasmagoric buildings that surround him in his present life. Each unoccupied building of his strolls along Beijing or Paris is a lost friend; each used syringe transfers the blood of one to the other. Heroine would be, in this case, the conducting thread in two temporal spaces: past, present. The future is that new path that García Alix is building away from his Madrid, between Paris and Beijing, amongst ghosts, being one of them, the fear or the vertigo of being and remaining alive. He questions us from that looking backward in order to see ahead: “…many things have happened in these thirty years…” In García Alix’s opinion, photography is based on what is visible and on seeing and seeing oneself too much, possessing with malice and intentionality that memory of “the unspeakable that wants to be spoken of.”
García Alix never dreamed of being a photographer, and almost without meaning to, he has been an eyewitness of an epoch; we might say that he is rather a survivor of these past thirty years, during which he has witnessed the departure of many of the protagonists of his images. He began his career as an autodidact, interested in the world of comic strips, the movies, and the underground world. As of 1976, he began to photograph the world around him. Many have branded him responsible for photographically documenting the Madrid “Movida” of the 1980s, a movement in which he was, in fact, deeply immersed, and only ended up documenting it as an extension of the experience of living it.
García Alix immerses us in the delirium of underground worlds that harshly pursued spaces of freedom: that stratum of Madrid youth that woke up wildly after forty years of Francoist gagging: the nightlife, the bars, the motorcycles, sex, hard drugs, jails, prostitutes and transvestites, identity fantasies and of course, death, were part of his own road.
In any case, the body of his photographic and audiovisual work moves the viewer in a way that eludes contemporary indifference: the revealed identity of the subjects of his portraits, and the confirmation that we are always denying the worlds that we do not feel comfortable seeing are combined with an intimate, stark, personal view from which taking pictures “is like portraying the limbo that precedes hell.” García Alix, the poet of an accursed light, makes a masterly use of this light and of composition. His images boast a graphic effectiveness that is seldom seen in the work of photographers like Larry Clark and Nan Goldin who have shared his choice of the dark side.
García Alix composes his images with elements that are not related to an objective reality but to a poetic one, for they are referred to him, and only starting from that point do they also belong to others. In this time of compliant aesthetics, prudish and puritan in which we are living today, it is fundamental that the work of masters such as García Alix be present, that it travel, and that it remind us that there is always a dark side and a reality that is built from the mouth of the abyss. From where there is no return.