pinned.events

The Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània (CCCC) presents "Letter and Time Signature", the latest exhibition by National Photography Award winner Chema Madoz, in which he brings together his interests in music and books for the first time. Featuring 50 photographs, the exhibition invites visitors to explore the visual poetry of one of Spain’s most internationally recognized photographers. Images such as a score woven on a loom, a spider at the piano, a frog in treble clef, flutes turned into a dangerous weapon, a musical blind, a whip transformed into a note, a mirror-book, a knife-violin, and a sand book open a world of fantasy, harmony, and beauty. Madoz’s work is built on combining objects and transforming them into something else, often with clear surrealist references. In recent years, he has also been closely associated with the world of books, not only through his photographs but also through collaborations with writers such as Joan Brossa, Leopoldo María Panero, and, posthumously, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, whose aphorisms he has illustrated. Through work with publishers and museums, he has also published around twenty books. The exhibition is also a tribute to music and marks the first time he has united his two great passions in a single presentation. In keeping with his aesthetic, the installation itself is conceived as a visual score, leading visitors into a vast staff where the images are arranged at different heights like musical notes. A composition of pins, phrases turned into threads, a book-staircase, a written cage, a spider hanging from a phrase, ink turned into night, a desk turned into a book, a lamp that emits phrases, a labyrinth of letters, and a book-arch all contribute to Madoz’s fantastical world, where his works align with one of the fine arts’ core aims: the search for beauty, harmony, and the expression of emotions and ideas, completed in the viewer’s gaze.