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PAISAJES ESENCIALES

Emptiness, tranquillity, quietness and chilliness; austere and lonely. These are associations that you would not immediately expect from the work of a photographer from the lively, colourful and eruptive Central America. But they are precisely what Luis Parades (b. 1966) seeks. In the early 1990s he processed his memories of the internal conflicts in the land of his birth in photo series such as Revelations and Mutations: formal and expressive work in which he scratched negatives, tore paper and was the first photographer in El Salvador to publish explicit nude photographs. When he contemplated the mangled landscape where land mines left behind from the conflict were detonated, he photographed the remains of half-burned – but also still partly fresh – flowers for Burnt Garden. Since then Paredes has settled in Denmark, where for a long period leukaemia prevented him from working. On the Baltic Sea he ultimately found recovery from his illness and inspiration for his Paisajes Esenciales (Essential landscapes). Paredes photographed the same location on different days and under various circumstances. All drama is absent from the montages constructed from these shots. What remains is an empty landscape, the passage of time and the ever=present horizon in a sea of silence. These poetic photographs announce a new phase in Paredes oeuvre.

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