UR AITZ

In UR AITZ, Jon Cazenave gives photographs a new layer of meaning, inspired by visits to Paleolithic caves in various locations across Europe. He paints his images with mineral pigments that he extracts from the very same nature he has photographed. For this, he uses the same painting technique that people from the Paleolithic period, many thousands of years ago, must have used to create ritual cave wall paintings. In juxtaposing the pigments with a documentary depiction of the nature they are derived from, he evokes various layers of reality. Cazenave creates a meeting of the present with our most ancestral past, from a time when the term ‘landscape’ was still free from the human cultural gaze. The title of his series refers to the rock – aitz in Basque – from which the pigment is extracted, and the water – ur – which it is subsequently diluted with.