/ PRESENTATION
SUBSTRATUM
Gonzalo Borondo
by Andrea Tinterri
GIANO
Two small recesses oriented towards the road, protected by a portico facing Via Emilia. These are the places of the narrative incipit of SUBSTRATUM, Gonzalo Borondo’s exhibition. Places that contain two images, stratified photographs showing a rotating face. The portrait is that of photographer Nadar, who, in 1865, captured himself in a series of shots that returned his own face in a three hundred and sixty degree rotation. Borondo makes the French photographer’ fatigue his own,
but he does so refusing the single shot static nature; he superimposes the photographs to create a complete portrait in which the face recognition diminishes in a convulsion of concurrent frames. Every quote and every reference to the history of photography has a specific weight and addresses the exhibition narrative.
Borondo opens the exhibition with images of one of the most important portraitists of all times, whose aim was to reach that intimate resemblance that corresponds with the moral intelligence of your subject. But this resemblance is denied in Borondo, in fact, it is purposefully erased in favour of a persistent superimposition; the photograph is not a trace that captures the instant, it contaminates Time. Indeed the exhibition is presented as a superimposition of planes in which photography is confounded and blended neutralising the recognition of the subject. Because what emerges is a million years old present, one that is not susceptible to history solicitation or passing trends, but is rooted in an archaic image,
of idols that follow one another and transform, their own totemic function unaltered. And the portrait acts as adhesive, the photographs of Nadar posses a perfect correspondence with two large self-portraits of Borondo that appear within the cloister of the exhibiting space. A window wide open onto a tree tunnel in perspective and statues of ancient heroes placed on high pedestals are superimposed on the nape and face of the artist, respectively, suggesting an eternal landscape that absorbs every image, every photograph, every gaze transit.
Giano who looks at the past and at the future, the artist who turns idol in a syncretism that welcomes and collects the memory of the whole humanity; the gate is a threshold that implies a crossing not necessarily into the new.
The portrait maintains an ambiguous relationship with the time of the story, it converses with the heroic torment statuary, rather it contains it in order to highlight a perpetual present and an ahistorical cyclic nature.
Although indirectly, Nadar research is kept under the radar, a constant dialectic between past and future that in the French photographer is declared through an alternation of high and low, sky and subsoil that cuts across the portrait.
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (Nadar’s real name), who was passionate about aeronautics, was the first to photograph Paris from above, thanks to a hot-air balloon, and the first to capture the catacombs and sewers of the French capital, thanks to the use of artificial light. In doing so, he signals a perhaps symbolic correspondence, proposing a total portrait of the city. This ductility appears to, with an imaginative effort, support Borondo’s research, the subterranean of the story emerges to the surface and into the present. It is not a coincidence that Nadar wanted to photograph Paris beyond the limit of the street, because it is in the unreachable that the intimate resemblance essential to the portrait is found.
And Borondo clarifies this passage in the title itself; SUBSTRATUM refers to an erosion of the apparent, an act of coring of time and accumulation of memory, in which the portrait, or self-portrait, combines the seeming distance between a before and an aUer, between the sky and the subsoil. Borondo’s photography is an open image that absorbs and becomes identity, it is a porous surface, permeable to the myths of history.
by Domenico Russo
THE FIRST MAN SUBSTRATUM
At times, closing our eyes, we see faces, landscapes, images that rarely appear lucent and clear. Blurred beyond the fogs of memory, the visions do not elude the essence of the subject that remains extraordinarily visible in its contours in the penumbra. This dialectic between indefiniteness and essence is an evocative movement, sometimes spontaneous, a surprise that verges on the unexpected.
Analysing in depth such sensation in SUBSTRATUM, Gonzalo Borondo accesses his father’s and public’s photographic archive, and he does so in the similar way conscience moves over the surface of memory: that is how it succeeds in settling in the eye of the beholder. A moment of connection initiates another journey that calls on the soul and every human sense.
We are in the birthplace of names.
Here, we move in a way that is not random, just like in SPAZIOC21, where the end of a simple architecture fades into temple and turns into a sacred forest, capable of enduring history as archive of variable images. Borondo is like the first man; in naming, he establishes words and terms of a new language, opening the way of communication. Once he has given his artworks their identity, though, they begin to tell their stories to one another, to independently live the relationship with their interlocutor, who is none other than the observer who participates in their presence.
The artist tries a language, photography is an atypical tool of him, and balances skillfully a varied system of techniques in order to give life to the expanded story of a feeling. Life flows deep, enveloping, in the uterus of this art, remote and present at the same time. Audience and artworks mutually merge with one another and we understand how for Borondo to make art is first an act of love towards the other. Or also an act of faith, a belief in the unknown, in humankind and the magnificence of feeling in every time and place.
The artist puts in play an emotional perception, melancholy and complex, spiritually distant from the tarmacked world, solid and electronic, but connected to everything through glass sheets and other semitransparent materials that favours the spatial permeation of the planes and the formation of the artist’s personal poetry. Layer upon layer adds to the variety of existence, in a functional, and beautiful, whole: an harmonious diorama on a rarefied summit, from which what moves beyond the surface can be glimpsed.
The bottom is a suggestion, a whisper. At times, what seems superfluous becomes essential, and in the seemingly secondary data of the contemporary, in its scraps, in its anachronism, the maps of a better future are found, a more sensitive future, one that does not forget the past.
The passage of time settled in the substratum dissolves a value system, releasing the density of today’s life in an alternative spiritual dimension; on a different plane of experimental photography, varied living possibilities are executed, welcomed in the gap between high and low, street and church, sky and earth, sacred and profane, modern and
classical. And a gradual loss of the present takes place, not by substitution, but by addition. Like an overtaking of the absolute wakefulness. From that frontier, nexuses lose sheen, and the image of something different, even of ourselves, reveal itself strong and throbbing. Everything is history, and everything is today.
The form, precise and meticulous, sustained by the character impressed on the sheets is always deep. Its intensity is a matter of emotion, pleasure, or inquietude. And our faces, straight towards Borondo’s images, go through them, through the echoes of time, and therefore contribute in affrming the reality of existence. As if the artist were asking our eyes to call on a name, to faces, statuary, landscapes, and architectures; to shout to them that they can reciprocate, as vibrant forms of the present, because in order to live fully our own time, we have to stand alive before the past.
Then we open our eyes, and the images in our mind instantly disappear, evaporate. But the memories somehow remain. That is where SUBSTRATUM operates, excluding the disappearance. With a reversed and positive act of foreclosure, Borondo elicits a memory that is stable, present, and spiritual.