Paolo Gasparini

The exhibition Paolo Gasparini. Field of Images provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, focusing not only on his photography but also another of his main expressive supports, the photobook, a crucial narrative mechanism for defining the history of photography in Latin America. His six decades as a photographer offer a broad itinerary through several mutating cityscapes: Caracas, Havana, São Paulo, and Mexico City, not forgetting feedback from Munich, Paris, London and Barcelona.

The exhibition is divided into sixteen sections that feature some of the artist’s most important projects, with an emphasis on his photobooks, which the photographer recognizes as a means of expression that is just as valid has his photographs.

Paolo Gasparini is the photographer who has best portrayed the cultural tensions and contradictions of the South American continent. His images convey the harsh social reality faced by a region whose cultural authenticity is unquestionable, and where the past and local traditions parley with a clumsily imposed modernity. Gasparini creates an oeuvre with its own visual language that always seems to express a criticism of consumer society while at the same time revealing a certain obsession with the way we are seduced by marketing and advertising.

Italian by birth yet Venezuelan in spirit, through his work the photographer has tried to eliminate the ethnocentric visions and stereotypes that have historically defined Latin America, almost always in terms of ‘the other’, fueled by the different populisms and nationalisms the region has endured.

The exhibition Paolo Gasparini. Field of Images provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, focusing not only on his photography but also on another of his main expressive supports, the photobook, a crucial narrative mechanism for defining the history of photography in Latin America.

The exhibition offers the opportunity to enjoy a journey through several mutating cityscapes: Caracas, Havana, São Paulo, and Mexico City, not forgetting feedback from Munich, Paris and London.

At the end of so many trips, I think some images still bite, or sting, as Barthes points out. I believe that photographs can help us in the difficult task of ‘knowing how to see’, of thinking and resisting this world that is so consecrated to the grandiloquence of the cosmorama, of the representation that propagates lies and increasingly belittles and disparages life
– Paolo Gasparini

Paolo Gasparini
until 16 January 2022

KBr Fundación MAPFRE Photography Centre
Avenida del Litoral 30
08005 Barcelona
kbr.fundacionmapfre.org

Paolo Gasparini Electoral campaign Avda. Urdaneta, Caracas, Venezuela, 1968 © Paolo Gasparini

Paolo Gasparini Regreso a casa, São Paulo, 1997 Fundación MAPFRE Collections © Paolo Gasparini

Paolo Gasparini Para verte mejor, América Latina, São Paulo, 1972 [de la serie Andata e Ritorno] Colecciones Fundación MAPFRE © Paolo Gasparini