Sergio Belinchon at VOLTA NY

Invaliden1 Galerie is proud to announce its participation to VOLTA NY (5th-8th March 2015) together with GE Galeria.

A new series of photographs by Sergio Belinchon (Spain, 1971, lives in Berlin, Germany) and a dia projection installation will be shown at the invitational solo projects fair for contemporary art.

Since 1997, through video, film and photography Belinchon’s research focuses on landscape, city and urbanity as well as on the artificialisation of the landscape, the manipulation of nature, and man’s mark on particular environments.

The most recent series of works is “Venus Grotto”, a corpus of photographs inspired by the artificial cave ordered in the XIX century by King Ludwig II of Bavaria to be built at his Linderhof Palace.

The cave was turned into a grotto that featured a lake illuminated by coloured lights to create a rainbow-like effect. His grotto was complete with handcrafted stalactites that drew upon the geological formations of the Grotta Azzurra in Capri.

Belinchón presents photographs of numerous caves that have been adapted to the needs of mass tourism recalling at the artificialisation of nature for economic purposes.

The artificial lighting used during visits to these natural spaces results in pictures that resemble colour-saturated early twentieth-century photographs that were coloured by manually applying dyes and anilines and skilfully create powerful dreamlike imagery.

These are contrasted with the nocturnal pictures of mountainous landscapes that stand in opposition to the colourful and elaborate underworld; they act as a reflection of the gloomy reality that Ludwig II was attempting to escape in his grotto.

Belinchón’s photographs produce connotations of a world of fantasy und unreality. They reflect on the thin line between reality and fiction and allude to a pictorial abstraction of surprising plasticity. Aesthetically, his photographs resemble the shapeless materiality of not knowing what we are seeing. Sergio Belinchón returns the natural elements of these architectural spaces and their manipulated geology to us in their natural form, without filters.