Paco Gómez Archive. The Poetic Instant and the Architectural Image

About

The exhibition "Paco Gómez Archive. The Poetic Instant and the Architectural Image", curated by Alberto Martín, and devoted to the photographer Francisco Gómez (Pamplona 1918 - Madrid, 1998), also known as Paco Gómez. He is considered to be one of the most singular photographers within the group of authors who renewed Spanish photography during the mid-20th century.

The aim of the exhibition is to show several aspects of Francisco Gómez's extensive photographic career, throughout more than 150 photographs and other materials, such as magazines and publications, in a journey that will take us from his most canonical and disseminated creation -the poetic moment, that suspends time and transcends the real- to the architectural image, as a poetic interpretation of architecture. Precisely, this exhibition highlights Francisco Gomez’s architectural photography, a field of work scarcely known, to which, however, he devoted most of his career throughout an extensive collaboration with Architectura magazine.

"He is one of the few photographers who consciously developed the practice of urban documentary. He photographed a crucial period for architecture in our country (from the 60s to mid-70s), as an important renovation was taking place, with great names and works", as explains the exhibition’s curator, Alberto Martín. He adds that Francisco Gomez's photographs transmit to the viewer when looking at his work "an almost existential realism of beauty and astonishment".
Francisco Gómez’s architectural images have a great expressive power thanks to lights and shadows, broken corners, walls and stairs, and unusual perspectives. An example of this is the photograph Torres Blancas, Madrid 1968 (architect Javier Saez de Oíza) or Vivienda unifamiliar Somosaguas from 1969 (architect Javier Carvajal).

Gómez knew how to portray Madrid suburbs’ growth, the borders where the city abruptly ends and the countryside begins; there, he places the human figure, in landscapes of uncompromising austerity (as seen in Barrio de Joaquín Rubio Camín, 1959). His work is thus equidistantly placed between realism and abstraction, between subjective photography and the neorealism characteristic of his time.