For more than ten years, the Toledan artist Juan Baraja has focused on observing architectural spaces at length. Through his lens and his meticulously detailed compositions we can discover the beauty of what is subtle and ordinary. His photographs are the result of encounters with apparently static places that acquire a new dimension due to his sensibility and wit.
El Orden Justo is his first individual exhibition in Latin America and is a review of the most representative series of his work. In Experimento Banana, Sert Miró, Águas Livres and Norlandia, he reflects upon social and cultural tensions related to space and the apparent stillness within transitions.
Juan Baraja has participated in various collective and individual exhibitions throughout the world and has been granted different prizes and awards. His works are in more than 20 collections including: The Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, The Cerezales Antonino y Cinia Foundation in Leon, and the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation in Madrid.
Hipódromo
The Hipódromo de la Zarzuela facility is a rationalist building designed in 1931 by architects Carlos Arniches Moltó and Martín Domínguez, with the collaboration of the engineer Eduardo Torroja. Having passed through moments of closure, operation and opening, the building was declared Artistic Historical Monument in 1980 and Place of Cultural Interest in 2009.
Once again, the light is the formal element in which Juan Baraja re(builds) the architectural experience. The white walls with angles that defy the spatial perception, the unique design of the stands, the robust columns that hold the roofs, the vaults that are open to the outside, the unusual smoothness of this building’s shapes. Everything is captured by the photographer’s lens in the most sensitive and sharp possible way.
Sert- Miró
The friendship between Josep Lluis Sert and Joan Miró began in the 1930s. That is when both were part of the Association of Amics de l’ Art Nou and gave way, among other creations, to the artist’s workshop in Mallorca, projected by Sert and built at the end of 1956. The clear nave created by Sert, refrained his friend from leaving for more than three years, that was the time necessary for Miró to make his first work in this place: a mural destined for Sert’s house in Cambridge (Massachusetts).
This workshop was Sert’s first work in Spain, where he had been banned as architect by the dictatorship after his exile following the Civil War. The concrete, stone and clay used to build the workshop bring together, with its own Mediterranean and unique personality, some of architecture’s characteristic features after Le Corbuisier and the modern movement with Sert’s maturity and his architectural language. The building is sensitive to the geographical context, to the Balearic architectonic tradition and Miró’s spirit.
In 2015, Juan Baraja was invited by the Miró Foundation to conduct a photographic project of this space, that is consecrated as Joan Miró’s creative factory until his death in 1983.
Norlandia
During 2014, while in the Listhus Residence, Juan developed several projects in Iceland. Norlandia was one of them. The project takes place in the small town of Ólafsfjordur, located on the northwest of the country. This town is inhabited by few people and is very important for the Icelandic fishing industry because it supplies several local and regional markets. For this reason, a great number of its residents work in Norlandia, a fishing company.
Because of its geographical location, the population of Ólafsfjordur lives under a particular condition that attracted the artist’s attention. During the whole month of July, its residents don’t see the sunset. This situation generates a special relationship between people and light (fundamental element in photography), generating an important dynamic for creating local superstitions surrounding this place.
Norlandia is one of the few Baraja projects where the human figure appears, showing his particular interest for the relationship between its residents and the space.
Experimento Banana
During 2014, Baraja conducted a photographic project in Iceland, while in the Listhus Residence. For this work, he decided to look at the physical and contextual decay of the Icelandic banana industry.
Even if it seems unbelievable, at the beginning of the 1940s Iceland started cultivating this fruit. It is a country with conditions that are seemingly far from perfect from the tropical idea of what is needed for bananas to grow. However, because of the volcanic activity of this region, there are fertile lands with good temperatures near the surface. For this reason, the study of geothermal energy is particularly important in this country and is one of its most important energy sources. This distinctive geological feature enabled Iceland to experiment with growing bananas and even generating a local market for this fruit during the 1950s.
Despite the government’s and scientific and educational institutions’ efforts to strengthen this industry, it was difficult to compete with the price of banana growers whose climate characteristics helped them have much lower production costs (for example Ecuador, Philippines, and Colombia). Consequently, this industry was less competitive and started diminishing and decaying over time, the same as the places where the bananas grew.
In Experimento Banana, Juan Baraja shows us the traits of a dreamlike industry, that even if fleeting, still exists and is about to become extinct. It is an acute view of industrial decay and the rationalist architecture of that time.
Catedrales
The Catedrales series was conducted between 2009 and 2012. In it, Juan Baraja captures the interiors of the cement factories of La Robla, Morata de Tajuña, Noblejas, Toral de los Vados and Murcia, that were industrial production centers that propelled the development of Spanish communities during the past century. The buildings are the remnants of a now forgotten time. They are abandoned, deserted, covered in dust, and transformed into memories made of concrete and steel. The series is named cathedrals because of the formal proximity of some of the buildings’ architectural elements with the cathedrals from the thirteenth century; its heights, its chambers, the spaces for storing devices; but above all, because of the kind of solemnity that the passing of time gives it and the light that it reveals, besides the spaces without any ornament and that are utopian dreams of development.
