Guillermo Srodek-Hart's recent photographs explore the rural territory of the province of Buenos Aires, documenting enigmatic abandoned architectures. With a sober record and an apparent lack of emotion, the images bring light to the traces of a productive system that in its progressive transformation has left a myriad of silent constructions to the mercy of nature; solid volumes in which, as the artist claims, "form survives function".
In contrast with his earlier work, where everything was color and abundance, in this body austerity predominates in the scale of grays and the desolate landscapes. Both coincide in the paradox of portraying spaces marked by the human footprint despite their absolute abscence; nevertheless, in the first body there was a vitality, a singularity and a whim that contrasts with the grave serenity of the latter.
In both, the artist extracts the most out of the frozen time that photography supposes, portraying scenarios that seem foreign to all temporality.
'Rural Installations' is the result of a delicate excercise of observation that does not leave aside the narrative potential of the photographic record. In his images we appreciate the vestiges of an industrial model in conflict with nature claiming the restitution of its kingdom. Even though these images were captured shortly before the global quarantines, their reading takes a new dimension in the postpandemic times that demand a redefinition of the contracts held between ecology and humanity.
Rodrigo Alonso