Bernardo Aja

Gallery section

«EntreMuros»

Bernardo Aja

…. Through the photos of Bernardo the viewer discovers his enormous culture, his generosity, the sources that inspired him, the tributes he wants to pay, a certain healthy vanity, and a powerful capacity for seduction to make adults become children during the work sessions and that the children apply themselves as adults to respond to the orders of their director. …..

….. Bernardo’s photos have to be seen many times, because they tell a lot about it. In the first glance, one vaguely deciphers the geography: Peru, Mexico, the Philippines …

….After more than one visit  it is the characters who address you: ancestry, decadence, tenderness, pride, dignity, daring, restraint, melancholy … And only in the later looks we discover the games of mirrors, the broken symmetries, the delight in certain textures. Characters appear to us, it seems they are not in the photos and yet they are present.

….Gestures that apparently reveal nothing and that, nevertheless, reveal everything. The viewer wonders: what do these characters want to tell us? Do they love themselves? Do they love each other? they hate each other? They are free? Do you feel trapped? They’re happy? Do their circumstances weigh on them ? And the past that they show and the one they don’t? Do you feel comfortable posing? Doubts lash out: who are the finally true protagonists of these photos? people? houses? Are they, perhaps, those details that Bernardo hardly shows and that he barely hints at us? Did he want to take us there? That I think is finally the true «journey» that the exhibition «EntreMuros» makes you every time you face (and, incidentally, surrender) to it: that of confusion, concern and fascination in which they embark you those photos of a cultured, respectful, provocative and mundane Spaniard.