Jacobo Biarnes' photostream

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†Of Bodies and Life†ª

Jacobo Biarnes (Palma de Mallorca, 1981), started taking pictures of sea landscapes and interior scenes with his friends in his island, as he was fully studying an osteopathy career at the Universidad Autonoma of Madrid. He abandoned the clinical manipulation of the bodies to give them life within powerful likenesses of the people he knew during the nights of Madrid.

These are already three years that Jacobo totally works on photography by his own. He received his first formation by the hands of the well-known Spanish photographer Pablo PÈrez Minguez, and has exhibited in many bars through Madrid. He writes poetical texts from which he’s been awarded by the first prize of the Center of Poetical Studies of Madrid in 2004.

For him photography is a medium allowing to put the world – his world – on scene, to give it a slow and intense movement full a baroque and dizzy tension. The numerous interpretations of the most striking facts of literature and history of Art (SalomÈ serie), through the prism of his own experience, give life back to these anonymous models by re-treating aesthetics concerns within a contemporary background.
Jacobo also works from the ´†clichÈs†ª of the fashion world, transforming these clean images into an ill at ease, anxious and tragically scenes. Thus, by looking at these photographs, the impact or sentimental attraction – sometimes sexual – of a youth ready to anything for some few moments of happiness, turns into a strange but sweet mental decline. Although his work does not aim to a social critic – even if he denounces the dangers of the fashion world – his models entirely play and fully participate the game.. Jacobo expresses the meeting with the “other”, like in a mute dialogue, a purely visual experience.

If he has for references Alberto Garcia-Alix, Jock Sturges, AndrÈs Serrano, Nan Goldin or Joel-Peter Witkin, which he admires between all of them, Jacobo knew how to give a different and introspective gaze on his own life - a cathartic mirror – and on the life of the people he met. May these people be artists, actors (like the youth revelations Maria Valverde or Oscar Jaenada), the unknown and the anonymous, Jacobo’s portraits defy the viewer into a play of attraction/revulsion, movement/pause, action/apathy. The eye against the eye with the model, as the strange angulation that already define his own style, give a psychological depth within mental spaces

Sexual images, bisexual (Geminae Veneres serie), ambivalent (Hermaphrodite, la bizarre fleur), his whole work play on the contrast and altering of values and feelings, passing through excessively cruel moments and intense interior scenes exaggeratedly sweet. (Madame RÍve serie)†; a reflection on solitude and boredom that Jacobo treats with a great beauty ; youth’s beauty, dangerous beauty, and beauty of a skinny life and skinny bodies.
Some details are repeated, conferring a false impression of a mental cosiness, of a happy-go-lucky youth ; a deaf rebellion, a sick attitude. Jacobo’s photographs not only represent a flag of the Spanish alternative culture and art, but a clear aesthetic inclination going beyond of the contemporary artistic topics, as a bet for a new kind of likeness.

His young age, so as the originality of his work as the high pictorial quality, are for us the signs of a career that will undoubtedly participate the Spanish photography renewing.
This multimedia presents a short but representative selection of his already abundant production.




Antoine Levi,
Madrid, 19 de Mayo del 2004