{"id":10161,"date":"2023-04-29T10:05:32","date_gmt":"2023-04-29T08:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spazioc21.com\/substratum-gonzalo-borondo\/substratum-gonzalo-borondo-presentation\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T15:16:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T13:16:17","slug":"presentation","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.spazioc21.com\/en\/substratum-gonzalo-borondo\/presentation\/","title":{"rendered":"SUBSTRATUM – Gonzalo Borondo- presentation"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row full_width=”stretch_row” el_class=”riga”][vc_column width=”1\/4″ offset=”vc_hidden-sm vc_hidden-xs”][vc_widget_sidebar sidebar_id=”cs-33″][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”2\/4″][vc_empty_space height=”85px”][vc_column_text]\/ PRESENTATION<\/strong>[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

SUBSTRATUM
\nGonzalo Borondo<\/h2>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]by Andrea Tinterri<\/p>\n

GIANO<\/strong>
\nTwo 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\u2019s exhibition. Places that contain two images, strati\ufb01ed 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\u2019 fatigue his own,
\nbut 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 speci\ufb01c weight and addresses the exhibition narrative.
\nBorondo 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<\/em>. But this resemblance<\/em> 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,
\nof 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.
\nGiano 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.
\nThe 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.
\nAlthough 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.
\nGaspard-F\u00e9lix Tournachon (Nadar\u2019s real name), who was passionate about aeronautics, was the \ufb01rst to photograph Paris from above, thanks to a hot-air balloon, and the \ufb01rst to capture the catacombs and sewers of the French capital, thanks to the use of arti\ufb01cial 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\u2019s 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<\/em> essential to the portrait is found.
\nAnd Borondo clari\ufb01es 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\u2019s photography is an open image that absorbs and becomes identity, it is a porous surface, permeable to the myths of history.[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space height=”64px”][vc_column_text]by Domenico Russo<\/p>\n

THE FIRST MAN SUBSTRATUM<\/strong>
\nAt 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 inde\ufb01niteness and essence is an evocative movement, sometimes spontaneous, a surprise that verges on the unexpected.
\nAnalysing in depth such sensation in SUBSTRATUM, Gonzalo Borondo accesses his father\u2019s and public\u2019s 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.
\nWe are in the birthplace of names.
\nHere, 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 \ufb01rst 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.
\nThe 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 \ufb02ows 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 \ufb01rst an act of love towards the other. Or also an act of faith, a belief in the unknown, in humankind and the magni\ufb01cence of feeling in every time and place.
\nThe 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\u2019s personal poetry. Layer upon layer adds to the variety of existence, in a functional, and beautiful, whole: an harmonious diorama on a rare\ufb01ed summit, from which what moves beyond the surface can be glimpsed.
\nThe bottom is a suggestion, a whisper. At times, what seems super\ufb02uous 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.
\nThe passage of time settled in the substratum dissolves a value system, releasing the density of today\u2019s 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
\nclassical. 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.
\nThe 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\u2019s 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.
\nThen 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.[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space height=”64px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n