At Fundación Larivière, the renowned photographer presents a new series, Materia. In it, industrial vestiges in urban areas appear in an ashen tonality that alludes to the passage of time.

In an interview given on the occasion of the opening of Materia, in which Juan Travnik (Buenos Aires, 1950) presents a series of 53 recent images, the photographer confessed the fear that sometimes arises when one takes the risk of leaving behind the comfort of showing work that has already been seen, tested, and well received. However, he concluded by saying: “In this case, I took that risk because it seems interesting to me, with all the good and bad that it may have.” Doubt is perhaps one of the most human—yet least confessed—feelings we can hear in artists with careers as established as Travnik’s. Today he directs the Photography degree program at the School of Art and Heritage of the National University of San Martín; he has been a full member of the National Academy of Fine Arts for over eight years and managed the Fotogalería del Teatro San Martín from 1998 to 2015.

Materia was initially conceived as an opportunity to revisit his production retrospectively. But the dimensions of the exceptional gallery at Fundación Larivière Fotografía Latinoamericana, in La Boca, made it more fitting to present this body of work, entrusted to the perspective proposed by a specialist in Latin American photography such as Alexis Fabry.

Acting as curator of the exhibition, Fabry is the author of Latin American Photography 1895–2008 and editor at Toluca Ediciones, where he has published other books by Travnik. They have known each other for more than 20 years and meet whenever Fabry visits Buenos Aires. It was he who suggested that, because of the framing in an almost closed plane and the mid-tones present throughout the series, these works could be linked to certain strands of Informalism that developed in Argentina from the late 1940s onward. For this reason, two paintings referenced by Fabry as “quotations,” loaned by a local collector, are included in the gallery on Caboto Street.

These are an untitled burlap-on-wood piece by Noemí Di Benedetto (1959–60) and an untitled oil on canvas by Clorindo Testa dated 1958. Neutral tones dominate the former, while the latter shows a touch of very muted color. Regarding this relationship with the pictorial—where some works appear at first glance almost abstract, something especially evident in a large-scale image at the entrance dominated by blue tones—Fabry and Travnik discussed with Ñ this apparent contradiction between the referential nature of photography and the abstraction of Informalist painting, clarifying their viewpoints.

“On the one hand, there are visual elements that can be associated with a certain movement and type of painting,” Travnik notes. “And at the same time, I say no, because the scale I give my work is that of the direct shot, which tries to preserve the parameters of traditional photography.” Fabry adds: “This image at the entrance seems even more pictorial than others in the show because its function is quite undefined—we don’t really know what is there. There are no doors, no windows; it is almost a pictorial plane without depth, where we cannot hold on to anything recognizable.”

Travnik continues: “I’m interested in a more active viewer, who does not only see what jumps out immediately, and there they might come into contact with painting.”

Materia is a succession of captures from certain urban neighborhoods. Barracas or Floresta, once developed around industrial production, today display a certain neglect in the form of stains on walls, patches, cross-outs, illegible texts. As the presentation notes, they are true “vestiges of what has been removed or replaced, and the breaks or wear caused by the passage of time, producing a series of layers that, like sediments, build the possibility of an approach that results in images of mysterious ambiguity and multiple readings.”

Regarding the essence he captures in these walks through the neighborhoods, Travnik shares his intentions. He explains that setting out at such early hours is also a deeply solitary introspection, a need to feel the calm that precedes the bustle of movement that comes later. He takes great pleasure in these walks through the neighborhood, or in getting out of the car to wander the streets, waiting for something that signals he has found a sign. “For me, there is something miraculous in the moment of finding something; I feel an irresistible impulse, like a desire, and I always think that the images that arise from that irresistible desire not to let it pass are the most effective,” he reflects. “Among the photographs, there is only one shot of a steel column that I captured at Corrientes and Florida, where I thought I had to return at noon and waited, as if distracted, until for a few moments there were no people, and then I took advantage.”

To work comfortably, he uses a very small Sony digital camera that can easily be concealed; it allows him some flexibility in the final framing and preserves the square format of the large analog cameras he used in other series about the city. When asked whether digital technology changed his practice, Travnik admits that he never introduces a new element to add to it, only a slight adjustment. “This doesn’t change the essence of what I do; it’s a license I can take because I am not a documentarian,” he adds.

When the subject of color in his work arises, a detail of Materia becomes clear: color functions as a founding material. “There are times when color in a shot becomes a kind of leading figure that makes it even more attractive than everything else in the image. In my case, by using many mid-tones, I link that material to an ashen color, a certain appearance of very subtle grain, which turns color into matter, with a tactile subtlety. In most of my photographs this ashen tonality is present, both as tone and as a record of the passage of time—the ashen quality brings in that theme of time.”

In the text of the book presented at BAphoto 2023, CONICET researcher Natalia Fortuny establishes a possible link between this series and literature in which the city is a central theme. She recalls descriptions by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, who also had a penchant for wandering the city, discovering that “light, color, and forms lavish masterpieces on a piece of wall, among the branches of a tree with a building behind it, in an irregular perspective, on a cornice or in a doorway.” She also connects it to the flaws present in Los restos (2007), with photographs taken after the return of democracy. Regarding the use of color, she insists that a clear precedent is Travnik’s work with similar materiality in his series Bancos (2005), where “Travnik offers images of the 2001 crisis and its banking freeze.” These photographs, taken between 2003 and 2005, showed the persistence of metal sheets covering bank doors “and forming part, with their hammer marks and graffiti, of the normality of our urban landscape.”

These contemporary fossils, where walls act as palimpsests revealing layers of urban use, captured with marked frontality and almost no depth of field, where interrupted geometries appear, remnants of graffiti, sealed doors hidden behind rusted grilles, worn fabrics covering openings, constitute, as Fortuny notes, “a situated, territorialized photography.” In its insistence and repetition, it appears with the force of an inexact double. If one only comes to know a city by losing oneself in it, Travnik loses himself in order to fire, with his camera—a small David’s sling—brief images toward that giant which seems impossible to grasp. His photographs bring us closer to the material vibration of that which, without moving, nonetheless stirs.

Link: https://www.clarin.com/revista-n/juan-travnik-pedazo-pared_0_QqokW2XbAp.html