The Maison de l'Amérique latine in Paris returns to photography with an exhibition dedicated to a major figure in this discipline in Latin America: the Peruvian Javier Silva Meinel. Titled "Umbrales, Javier Silva Meinel. A Poetics of the Image" (umbrales means thresholds in French), this retrospective event is curated by Alejandro León Cannock in association with Galerie Younique.
For the first time in France, no fewer than one hundred images combining silver gelatin prints, digital prints mounted on aluminum, backlit light boxes, and wallpapers are being shown to visitors. This unprecedented proposal invites them to immerse themselves in the work of one of the most important Peruvian photographers of his generation, or even in the history of Latin American photography. The journey imagined by Alejandro León Cannock will lead them into a universe that is as wonderful as it is quirky and strange, born from the visions of Javier Silva Meinel. Like a journey from day to night, both physical and spiritual, across the entire territory of Peru, Silva Meinel—much like Irving Penn or Martín Chambi—recreates the studio along the way. Taking time with his subjects, he develops a singular complicity with them. Addressing his favorite themes (masks, passages, artifices, animals, strangeness, encantados) for over four decades, Silva Meinel has ceaselessly traveled the Pacific coast, the Andes mountains, and the Amazonian forest in search of signs, interstices, glimmers, and epiphanies that invite the viewer to cross the threshold of the known to penetrate the depths that constitute the unconscious of reality: an intermezzo. In his images, the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic intertwine and merge, creating a space of transition; where photography reveals itself as a liminal phenomenon: the threshold-image. A place of transit and transformation, like a passage connecting here and there, the visible with the invisible, the real with the surreal. Patient and constant work over the years—a work of proximity, listening, dialogue, and sharing—has been the method, but above all the ethics, of Silva Meinel. And what is not visible on the surface of the images is nonetheless felt in their atmosphere: a breath made of curiosity, fascination, respect, and delicacy runs through his photographs, enhancing the presence of those he photographs and restoring their full sensory power. He demonstrates that the image can be a place of reciprocity and shared presence. In this era of essentializing the representation of the other, Silva Meinel's work reminds us that other figures of the photographer are possible: perhaps he is, above all, a weaver of links, stories, relationships, and imaginaries.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Javier Silva Meinel