Jose Gallardo: Paddock
Paddock is an audiovisual project that revolves around memory, remembrance and the ephemeral from a personal, metaphorical, experimental and visually poetic vision with a certain halo of mystery and restlessness.
“I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
It consists of some pictures taken from my personal archive (some made without any artistic purpose during my working stage as a horse race photographer some years ago, others discarded in its day, all of them retouched, cropped and ruined, acquiring a new interpretation), not shot on purpose, a pair of videos, an audio track and an installation.
In it, I flee from the "beautiful photography", technically well done. I do not seek the understanding, approval and complicity of the viewer with my work - I do not show a reality, it is not a documentary work, here nothing is what it seems. I use horses not to talk about horses in this sort of personal exorcism, a portrait of my own circumstances as a human being.
I like to think of 'Paddock' as if it were a David Lynch movie, in which, in this eagerness to raise doubts, even I did not know if there was any narrative in the series of pictures and videos, or if everything is in the surface, in the aesthetics.
So it is the task of the viewer to draw their own conclusions, to decide whether the truth of the images is beyond themselves, what they let see and what they leave hidden.
It is not the first time that I deal with the subject of memories and confabulation (In psychiatry, confabulation is a disturbance of memory, defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive) in one of my projects.
