Blanco

Nacho Criado (Mengíbar, Jaén, 1943 – Madrid, 2010) is one of the most significant and influential artists on the Spanish contemporary art scene, winner of the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (2009). His work developed in tune with the experimental practices produced in the adverse climate of the final years of the Franco dictatorship, the most significant manifestation of which was the Encuentros de Pamplona in 1972. A pioneer of the so-called ‘conceptualism’ in Spain, his career includes echoes linked to minimalism, land art and arte povera. Nacho Criado’s work escapes labels or classifications and is situated in a permanent process that runs between the idea and its staging.

In the early seventies, Criado made intensive use of photography as a permanent field of experimentation, while at the same time forming part of the poetics of his installations. Thanks to a relative economy of means, his photographic works allowed him to translate the idea into an image, while at the same time serving as an archaeological memory. In the words of the film critic André Bazin, ‘Photography does not create – as art does – eternity, but embalms time; it merely subtracts it from its own corruption’.

In the early seventies, Criado made intensive use of photography as a permanent field of experimentation, while at the same time forming part of the poetics of his installations. Thanks to a relative economy of means, his photographic works allowed him to translate the idea into an image, while at the same time serving as an archaeological memory. In the words of the film critic André Bazin, ‘Photography does not create – as art does – eternity, but embalms time; it merely subtracts it from its own corruption’. In this 1974 installation Criado proposes a specular play of opposites between the negative and the photographic positive by means of a double projection of slides. The images move simultaneously towards a progressive dematerialisation of meaning. Blanco sums up the important turn in Criado’s work in the first half of the 1970s: routes, combustion processes, residues of traces, Situations of permanent danger or reconstructions of ancestral situations. Criado then uses photography as a medium that seeks the urgent materiality of his ideas. The artist uses the photographic process in the opposite direction to its nature in order to take it towards a progressive dematerialisation of the objectual work. Light becomes matter while the object recedes in time.

Trascurso cotidiano (Everyday Course), 1974 (selection)

Originally presented at the German Institute in 1974 together with the work White. The work Everyday Life consists of a total of 167 slides divided into twelve different blocks of actions, five of which have been selected for this exhibition: Table (29 slides), Body (13), Bench (11), Entrances and Exits of Art Spaces (14) and Car (10).

1. Table (1-29)
2. Body (29-42)
3. Bench (42-53)
4. Entering and exiting art spaces (53-67)
5. Car (67-77)

Trasvase Memory

I want to talk about a childhood memory, about a doubt in the form of a mysterious object that has been with me ever since: about how an apparently banal object can be charged with thought.

It is the memory of a cardboard box stamped and signed by someone in diagonal, upward-falling calligraphy. A box inaccessible then, inaccessible now; a box placed at the top of a library in ‘safekeeping’. I seem to remember once hearing ‘Nacho Criado’ referred to that cardboard box at home, or maybe I’m making it up, it doesn’t matter. The memory of that enigmatic and warm cardboard box encloses to my eyes at the time the possibility of something hidden inside. The box sits on a shelf that is difficult for a child to reach; but that high place is where, despite all the precautions, it is first accessed. When I sneak it open, I don’t find much either; two glass bottles, one opaque (black) and the other transparent (half full), joined by a paper seal; and an envelope with photographs: a picture of two bottles, the same ones? some graphics, and more bottles, a mountain of empty bottles. Finally, two photographs with two pairs of bottles, almost identical, under an open domestic tap, seeming to fill or empty, depending on how you look at them. More unknowns from before, even now, in a mysterious transfer.

César Borja. May 2025