Field of Images. Paolo Gasparini. September 30, 2021–January 16, 2022. KBr Fundación MAPFRE Photography Center, Barcelona-Spain.

Fundación MAPFRE is presenting the first retrospective, with more than 300 photographs, in Spain on the photographer Paolo Gasparini (born Goritzia, Italy, 1934). Paolo Gasparini: Field of Images offers a complete survey of the six decades of the artist’s career, focusing on both his photographs and on another of his principal means of artistic expression, the photobook. Together they present a journey through different cities in a process of transformation: Caracas, Havana, São Paolo and Mexico City, and one that also has resonances of Munich, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid and London.

Gasparini’s work constitutes a journey which spans two opposing worlds but ones that have been historically interdependent. By means of his photography he aims to eliminate the ethnocentric vision from which Latin America has taken shape either through or in opposition to Europe and the United States. His works allow for an understanding not just of the differences between Europe and Latin America but also the diversity within the latter, from Mexico to south of the Andes. As the exhibition’s curator María Wills has observed: “Gasparini’s photographs reflect on the effects of decades of political migrations in the 20th and 21st centuries: migrations of Europeans to the Americas as a result of World War II; of Cubans to Spain and the United States; of Ecuadorians to Spain; and, more recently, the massive exodus of Venezuelans to Colombia. Generation after generation marked by voluntary and forced exiles inevitably make us reflect on the ambivalence of identity.”

Paolo Gasparini is the photographer who has best portrayed the cultural tensions and contradictions of the South American continent. His images convey the harsh social reality faced by a region of undoubted cultural authenticity and one in which the past and local tradition establish a dialogue with a heavy-handed, imposed modernity. Gasparini is engaged in the creation of a body of work with a unique visual language which always seems to express a critique of consumer society while revealing a degree of obsession with the way in which marketing and advertising seduce us. His images are real and reflect the chaos of contemporary life: advertising hoardings, reflections in shop windows, workers finishing their day, homeless people, passers-by, tower blocks, poor houses, political slogans and the harsh lives of the Andean peasants, all treated with the maximum respect and dignity, finding beauty in that quotidian chaos and showing its vitality.