Luis Gaspar’s Vallados at the Madrid Ateneo

A concertina – a barbed wire fence – is the main figure on the nearly 100 pictures that make up Luis Gaspar’s Vallados exhibition, opened on March 20 at Madrid’s Ateneo. The works are a result of casual meetings at Gaspar’s studio. Without any recommendation, the artist’s friends posed, facing this ‘weapon’.

Some of them showed a challenging attitude and grabbed it with their bare hands, there are others who show fear and need gloves to hold it, and the rest exteriorize their courage or help other people to go over it.

Among the protagonists we find Susanna Griso, Juana Acosta, Maxim Huerta, Fernando León, Aída Folch, Oscar Aibar, Carmen Ruiz, Ana Otero, Nieve Medina, Laura Lobo, Beatriz Montañez, Marta Poveda, Inma Turbau, Silvia Nieto, Teresa Nieto, Silvia Grijalba, Mónica Runde, Jessica Lyall, Santiago  Morilla, María José Rubio, Cristina Urgel, Emmanuel Toumar, Luis Martínez, Luis Miguel Cobo, Yolanda Dominguez, Ana Labordeta, Rodrigo Poison, Irene Arcos, Ledicia Sola, Duna Santos, Marta Poveda.

Vallados tackles the hard situation faced by immigrants who want to cross the border of Melilla. The show tries to make viewers reflect when they confront the concertina in an effort to show the reality lived by hundreds of immigrants these days.

The pictures are interspersed with texts written in first person, a result of the experience lived by some of the protagonists, and they are accompanied by a screening. Luis Gaspar prolongs the reflection on the snapshots and invites, within the framework of the exhibition, dancers, poets, actors and musicians to participate in activities for the public.  

Luis Gaspar (Madrid, 1973) got his bachelor’s degree of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is the son of a couple of actors and has worked as a scriptwriter, translator and theater actor, and he has also written and directed several short movies. The approach to photography came later, when he started to develop his fascination for light. After his multidisciplinary career in the theater and the movies, he began to publish works related to the fashion world in different means, and he came to portraits as a natural evolution of his artistic concept.

He has published several books on photography, the last of which was “50 miradas de España” (Ed. Planeta), which puts together faces of some of the most famous figures of our country: Mariano Rajoy, Felipe González, Leonor Watling, Fernando Trueba, Álex de la Iglesia, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, Alejandro Amenábar, Antonio López, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Belén Rueda, Concha Velasco, Eduardo Noriega, Ferrán Adrià…