SOBRE BLANCO

Specialising in portraits and reports for more than a decade now, they publish their images in the country’s most important magazines. They have been documenting all the artists who have passed through Naves Matadero - International Living Arts Centre since 2017, and in the 2018-2019 season they have only used one setting for their photo sessions: Hall 1 in Nave 10. The Sobre blanco exhibition is on display in this same location. The photographers explain it thus: “We went into a white room, with flat light... the idea was to seek neutrality in the environment and to portray the person who was going to be our subject. We set ourselves limits before we started this series. Our first intention was to always use the same corner, so that their soul would be the only oil on the canvas. And without meaning to, we got in there too. As always happens when you start a project, you never know where it's going to take you, and when you lock two photographers up in a white room for so long, six months, the corners of the cube start to bend”.

Each session started off cold, looking for a nice, harmonious portrait, and once that was done, they sought to turn it around (the skin). “Not everybody was up for that. The artists who have passed in front of our camera have surprised us with all their idiosyncrasies. Some of them left just as soon as they entered the room, because they couldn't stand the veracity of the whiteness. But most of them let us evolve with them and didn't want to leave. It was like being in a test tube mixing chemical without labels. Some even blew up”, say Ximena and Sergio.