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Mario Rabasco: Contingent Spaces. Visual Study on the University of Valencia

webmaster 27-01-2014

La NauCultural Centrefrom the University of Valencia kicks off its 2014 program with an interesting photographic display by Mario Rabasco. Espacios Contingentes. Estudio visual de la Universitat de Valènciais a work that allows viewers to get into contemporary photography throughout 43 spaces and architectural representations from the University of Valencia.

The show puts together images of popular spaces, but taken from a different point of view. Places without human presence, where it is perceived because of the marks left by unknown individuals; true scenes with an orderly-and-symmetric unreality halo, so both universes coexist and cohabit to bring about certain degree of banishment. Pictures of the Senate of La Nau, rector’s departments, faculties, laboratories, medical instruments, campus... Contemporary images, very sober, symmetric, strictly framed and organized, looking for realism but they seem to be unreal.

"They are familiar spaces to me and I’ve always felt the need to paralyze them, to capture those places of knowledge and power", Mario Rabasco comments on an approach to the reality that, according to the artist, has certain parallelism with the meticulousness of police work.

The curator of the show, professor of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Pep Benlloch, points out that "in this project, rational aspects have prevailed over any other consideration, the functional over the aesthetic, so the pictures show apparently impersonal spaces lacking of any content to surprise us... or it’s the other way round".

The name of the exhibition – Contingent Images –, something that might be or not at the same time, precisely refers to what each image evokes. Benlloch also explains that Mario Rabasco has used the frame-format, just as it’s been imposed in contemporary photography by Jeff Wall and photographers from the Dusseldorf School, like Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth or Andreas Gursky, among others.

Rabasco’s pictures share that original philosophy: they are strictly framed, sober; they capture wide spaces that are always shown from an objective point of view, with strict and calculated composition guidelines, always avoiding any alteration caused by surrounding subjects.

About Mario Rabasco Peiró (Canals, Valencia, 1966).
He graduated in Fine Arts, Valencia’s Fine Arts Faculty. He studied photography at Valencia’s School of Applied Arts. He is presently working on his doctoral thesis on photographer Chamorro. He teaches photography at the EASD (Valencia’s Higher School of Art and Design). He gives lectures to Photography masters at ELISAVA (Barcelona’s Higher School of Design and Engineering) and the Photography master at Valencia’s Polytechnic School. He has given multiple seminars and magisterial lessons at national and international levels, such as "Digital Photography and Techno-aesthetics" within the framework of Retina 2007, held in Mexico DF (Monterrey). He has carried out several solo and collective shows, and in 2006 he published his book Sant Antoni. Passatges d´un Ritualon the festive ritual of Sant Antoni en Canals (Valencia).