The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce that an exhibition of recent photographs by the Spanish artist Pablo Genovés, entitled Precipitados: Time’s Alchemy, will open on March 28 and continue through April 27, 2013. This will be Pablo Genovés’ first exhibition with Marlborough Gallery in New York. The exhibition will feature giclée prints ranging in size from an imposing 5 ½ x 4 ½ foot format to a more intimate 25 x 18 inches.

Pablo Genovés employs a combination of digital photography techniques and appropriated old images to create unusual and unexpected outcomes, leading the viewer to question the relationship between man and nature. This exhibition brings together works from two related series, Precipitados (Precipitates) 2008-2011, and Cronología del Ruido (Chronology of Noise) 2011-2012.

In Precipitados, emblematic Western cultural spaces are inundated with natural elements such as water, ice, and sand. Pablo Genovés explained that the landmarks he features are actually fictional; he combines aspects of different structures to elicit the strongest sense of what the viewer expects in a palace, church, or library. He stated, “I don’t want the spectator to feel secure in a real place; I want people to feel that it could be any of our historical treasures, a metaphor of our culture and cultural values.” Boreas Viento del Norte (Boreas North Wind), a black and white photograph, displays a deluge of wind and water invading a cavernous Baroque church, inside of which the wind whips the water into a fury and waves lash at the gates to the altar.

Civilization and nature confront each other and fight for the appropriation of literal space; Pablo Genovés captures an eternal battle with one poignant image.

With his most recent series Cronología del Ruido, Pablo Genovés further explores the catastrophic deterioration of palaces, churches, and libraries which, perhaps significantly, are the centers of power, religion, and education. Cronología del Ruido is set apart from Precipitados by the incorporation of industrial machinery as a source of physical ruin and the visual evidence of the remains after a flood. The majority of these photographs are sepia-hued, as opposed to black and white; the use of sepia toning, popular in the late 1800’s, calls to mind the period immediately following the industrial revolution when mechanical progress gained full momentum. The photograph for which the series was named, Cronología del Ruido, reveals a lavishly appointed ballroom, replete with chandeliers, delicate murals and gilded reliefs, with rocks and debris entirely covering the floor.

Among the debris the viewer is confronted with an unidentifiable mechanical apparatus, completely defunct and apparently contributing to the ruinous transformation of the building. The critic Lucía Carballal writes: Is renovation possible when catastrophe rises up before us as the natural and eternal state of things? In the images of Pablo Genovés, destruction transgresses the laws of time and establishes its own chronology.

The symbols and fictions of our culture apparently succumb in the face of the irruption of the untamable: mechanical natures, monumental in their disproportion and now out of all control…Genovés locates our myths and values in an arc of time and he pushes them to their limit, up to the moment immediately prior to breaking.

Born in Madrid, Pablo Genovés has studied at the Art Students League in New York, the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, and the Camden Arts Center in London. The artist currently lives and works in Madrid and Berlin. The work of Pablo Genovés has been exhibited both in Spain, and abroad, including France, Germany, England, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Philippines, Korea, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. His photographs are part of public and private collections worldwide.