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"Herbs", José Ramón Ais
June 9th - July 23th 20101 “HERBS”-José Ramón Ais
Within the programme of the Festival Off organized by PhotoEspaña 2011, the José Robles Gallery holds the exhibition “Hierbas” by the artist José Ramón Ais (Bilbao, 1971) which includes selected works belonging to the projects “Herbs” and “Drama in the garden” and proposes a personal reflection on the landscape.
“Herbs” shows artful plant landscapes that precisely show the artificial construction from which they emerge. Thanks to the Chroma Key, the blue sky becomes the scenery for a stage populated by all kind of plants: wild, ornamental, invasive, productive, ruderal and adventitious species acting according to their “naturalness” but subjected, as in a plan designed by a gardener, to the logic of the fiction they depict more than to the scientific rigor of the natural laws.
The “Drama in the garden” series is a photography project made in the domestic gardens of a small residential area. Vegetation in small gardens, orchards and flower pots becomes the protagonist of small portraits which take us to an idyllic universe.
The “Drama in the garden” series can be seen in the publication with the same title published by Belleza Infinita publishing company.
José Ramón Ais’s work is a composition work which makes reference to painting and the origins of photography, to the history of gardening, to the ikebana, to kitsch landscape calendars and to the employed imaging technologies themselves, including movie special effects. The last photograph suggests a thorough process which combines the image capture of each element (grass, clouds, bugs...), the discovery of their smells, shapes, names and properties, their hardworking selection, cleanliness and combination. Colours, shadows and textures are carefully treated by the author who rereads the history and aesthetic evolution of the landscape by imagining the science-fiction scenes announced by the biotechnology.
José Ramón Aís is Bachelor of Fine Arts by the Universidad del País Vasco and his work has been shown in numerous exhibitions at the Museo Artium, the Fundación Botín or Descubrimientos de PhotoEspaña among others.
