Do You Have a Calder in Your Garden (and Don't Know It)?
Alta is showcasing the Needles series, marking the artistic photography debut of Txema Yeste, one of the greats in fashion and advertising.
It turns out that you most likely have a Calder at home. In fact, many Calders. With the condition, of course, that you are fortunate enough to be the happy owner of a garden, and that in this garden you had at some point the good idea to plant a pine tree. Stone pine, if possible.
This is what Txema Yeste (Barcelona, 1972) did, and to his surprise – and all of ours – when the pandemic arrived, he had to seclude himself within the four walls (and garden) of his home, and started to ponder how to spend those long and solitary afternoons that we owe to Covid. Where until then he had only seen more or less bucolic but ultimately annoying pine needles, because sooner or later you have to collect and throw them in the trash, he saw unusual sculptural possibilities. And that's how that most humble material ended up becoming the fuel for the Needles series which until May 23 is exhibited at Alta, this miracle that Pancho Saula pulled out of his sleeve in 2021 and which, little by little, has just blown out its first three candles and celebrated its 10th exhibition.
A special exhibition for two reasons, he says. The first, because although he began his career as a photojournalist, Yeste is now one of the big names in fashion and advertising photography. With Needles, he moves away from the glamour and hyperproduction of Vogue and company, and debuts in creative or, let's say, artistic photography. And he does so with an object, a vocation, and results that are the antithesis of fashion magazine covers. Needles is almost arte povera. In fact, we can definitely remove the "almost." It is arte povera, ephemeral and casual, which begins as a pure game and ends up becoming an artistic meta-discourse. Do the exercise of observing the stunning photographs above: they were pine needles, Yeste first turned them into tiny sculptures and then dedicated himself to photographing them.
The result is something else: here, a ballerina, there, a cheerleader, further down, an African mask, or two lovers caught in full effervescence, a mantis, two skaters, a female pubis, or dozens of sperm fighting to be the first to reach the promised land.
What label do we put on Needles? Sculpture or photography? Figurative art or conceptual art? What has turned the inert pine needles from the home garden into art? The photographer's gaze, or the artist's? Without this gaze, would there be art? If we get really pretentious, Saula rightly says, we can also detect the trace of the decisive moment that Carter-Bresson preached: it's nothing more than the moment of precarious balance that Yeste captures with the camera (digital, by the way) before the pine needles turn back into inert matter.
What began in an essentially playful way with a certain naïve point became more complicated as Yeste shaped the pine needles, added shadows, and experimented with burned foliage. Calder is one of the names that easily comes to mind when we contemplate this work. But it doesn't take much for Pollock, Arroyo, and Wei Wei to show their influence. I'll tell you something: Yeste's photographs need the large format of the exhibition.
Standard reproductions don't capture the magic. And with this, I'm trying to make you see that it's worth a visit - by appointment, always - to the Alta. Saula acts there as a prophet of an art surprisingly neglected among us: we must be one of the countries with the most photographers per square meter, but we don't have any space to exhibit it, neither public nor private. Except for this miracle that is Alta.
But we said that Needles is a special exhibition for two reasons. We've already seen the first, Yeste's leap into artistic photography. The second is Saula's confirmation as a gallerist, which he wasn't until Ramon Masats came into his life. The late Catalan photographer starred in the last exhibition in Anyós and with him debuted at Paris Photo, with a notable impact that will translate into the upcoming publication of a volume by David Campany, director of the ICP in New York: "Until now I had limited myself to being a dealer. I acted as an intermediary to sell work by internationally renowned artists like William Wegman, Steven Meisel, Sarah Moon, and Joel Meyerowitz. They were already who they were before I exhibited them. But exhibiting Masats, almost unknown outside Spain, has been a before and after for his international recognition.
This is what makes me feel like a gallerist, what makes me vibrate and what I feel I'm also doing with Yeste." Who will also be the protagonist of Alta's second incursion into the international circuit, next April at Aipad in New York, the most important photography fair in America, and second in the ranking, only behind Paris Photo.
Needles, in short, is completed with a truly luxurious catalog published by RM, the first in Alta's history, with texts by Campany himself.
And now tell me: isn't it a miracle that we have all this in Anyós, and that it's exclusively the result of a visionary's drive?
