Landscape. The Eternal Return José María Mellado

LANDSCAPE. THE ETERNAL RETURN

Landscape. The Eternal Return tries to show how “modern man strives to make a place in history, to leave a legacy, to do his bit before his needy time runs out” **

José María Mellado (Almería, 1966) transfers his vision of the environment where the natural seems to coexist with the built. This impression is nothing more than an earthly mirage, since contemplating the artist’s snapshots we observe that any construction abandoned by man, losing its routine and functions, is left in the hands of a wild nature that quickly exercises a deep domination over its walls.

Abandoned plots in barren lands, uninhabited houses with spectral testimonies, evicted buildings that now serve as food for an eternal weed and shipwrecks, are some of the portraits that Mellado offers us in this exhibition, in his recognized eagerness to abstract what is really interesting, the magic that encloses what is mundane, vulgar or even ugly and, a priori, devoid of interest.

For him, a faithful friend of the technique, which he recognizes as a good ally to write without spelling mistakes, visual seduction is amplified in those images that we intuit repeatable by nature, but never as they were captured by his snapshot.

They are fragments of identifiable realities but of confusing narration that often show nature broken by the human being.

Through a compositional language that is artificially credible, although sometimes rationally impossible, the artist tries to recover a world that was, is and will be the same, and that makes sense precisely in that evolution of historical events that make us always reach the point from which we start, in eternal return.

Thus, Mellado’s photographs put their effort into reflecting timeless realities that we will hardly know if they happened or will happen, or both. We are restless in the face of their non-places, frozen in time and space, relative to ancient, present and future civilizations that show that Nature will always rule the world, very much in spite of Man. However, the Self will continue to try to subjugate it and in that struggle, as in so many others, we will dedicate our present time to record ourselves in a future time, just as in the past others already did.

Curator: Rafael Liaño
Catalogue:Editado por Yellow Consultores S.L
“ Miguel Calvo. The Myth of the Eternal Return of Mircea Eliade. A personal read