ON ARCANUS XIII:
In times of uncertainty due to the speed of change and the way it announces other realities, these are subjects that force us to think about the present. Polo Farrera's photographic series; Arcano XIII , a fundamental card of the Marseilles tarot, translates to the visual plane the reasons for anxiety and concern that overwhelm sensitive human beings.
At first glance, the photographic construction is a reinterpretation of the tarot card, worked in detail with objects, costumes and actors who stage an abrupt transit within a cloudy natural world, characterized by violence, the manipulative role of ideologies and platforms. Communication. It would seem that death, represented by a female figure, is the element that dominates the aesthetic experience of images. However, in a more detailed approach it is possible to observe how the present obeys a basic principle of existence: constant change. The human being is by nature a destitute nomad trying to satisfy his need for stability. However, the dynamics of the world, nature and the economy demonstrate how the ultimate universal law is transformation.
In the act of blinding life there is also a way to prepare the ground for a new process. It is in this innovative sense that the reading of the images proposed by the author offers a mixture of feelings with knowledge and critical judgments about the ethics of power, the disappearance of justice or the end of history. Symbiosis , for example, portrays the various faces of extermination that mark the way towards the mutation of life due to factors such as pollution, the sacrifice of animals or the incessant weight of time on the human race.
The content of the images in the Arcano XIII series is a mixture of philosophy, literature, and contemporary thought. The 1984 image constitutes a reference that has marked the information age and the effects of these technologies on the control of the lives of billions of users of digital networks. It also makes a reference to bookish knowledge and its contribution to the positive change of humanity.
In contrast, La Derrota makes a comparison with the advances in medical science, whose amazing results in the study of pain and disease demonstrate the double role that the idea of scientific advancement implies. The image raises the question about the meaning of survival in a world devastated by climate change.
Artistically, the photographic work of Polo Farrera has a maturity and an uncommon intentionality in the emerging generation of millennial artists. The aesthetic reinterpretation of the tarot with elements belonging to contemporary life generates evocative readings through the poetic use of objects. The author has used the paraphrase to create a strange world where the horror and the verisimilitude of the images lay the foundations of a plastic discourse whose undoubted vocation is the art of critical content. In a country like ours, death must be considered the beginning of change.
José Manuel Springer- Critic and art curator
ON IN SEARCH OF ABSENCES
Last year, I was invited to the International Photography Festival in Mexico, where I took part in portfolio reviews at the Centro de la Imagen, and it was there that I discovered the work of Polo Farrera. His presentation was rather quiet, with few words. After a few minutes of reviewing his material, I knew that it was unnecessary to ask more questions about the meaning of his work.
Death, the unavoidable reminder of our own transience, has been one of the most represented themes in the history of universal art. But how is the departure of a loved one visually materialized? Can the void they leave behind be represented?
Walking through "In Search of Absences" was entering a mysterious space inhabited by ghosts. Some of them levitated in colors and inspired me with peace, but above all, I saw them as close and luminous presences. I wanted to know who they were, why they had no faces or signs of identification. Later, I understood that they could also be my dead. The others, disfigured beings, seemed rather unsettling specters, probably because of the rivers of paint flowing from the furrows that were their eyes. Are they sad?
The variety of resources used by Polo to approach the same theme made my perception different each time depending on his medium. Analog photography, like no other, was born to overcome forgetfulness. But sometimes it's not enough. "To remember is to deform," I read in his writings. Polo tells me that he always wanted to be a painter, and I understand why. Narrative fiction, cyanotype, palimpsest are part of this body of work that captures the need to transform loss into a new acquisition. Why? Because perhaps memory is the only home we have.
Andrea Aguad Chacur- Curator
Jose Manuel Springer
Art critic and curator