Exhibited at Kyotographie (Japan) in 2018, at the former Sazanga-Kyu ice factory, curated by Gonzalo Golpe.
“What lives therein? say: his life alone, only his life.
A life, that if not his life, is nothing;
And that life consists entirely in being his,
In the certain knowledge that it is he is who lives it.”
A. G. C.
Alberto García Alix is a humanist who runs against the grain, ill at ease by nature. His portraits bear testimony to a life on the street, in the depths of the city, where colours are creeds and honor counts more than the law, where the individual still figures as the mainstay of the group, joining and bonding with others of like temperament sworn to be true to themselves. Presenting himself in this way, as an ontological affirmation, his resistance always comes as a living proclamation. Such is the stuff of which Alberto’s photographic works are made.
Over forty years since his first photographs, like a tree clinging to the edge of an abyss, barely anchored with roots hanging in the air, absurdly resistant and stubborn, Alberto lithely adjusts his bodily stance to offset his imbalance. He has to maintain the tension, to keep shooting.
With subversive fervor, ever hostile to order, Alberto feeds dissent with each portrait, flouting authority and scorning good manners. Unafraid of whatever it costs, fearing only not getting on with living. This is what makes everything happen. As Augustín García Calvo has said: ‘… being consists in self-possession, possessing is being, and so that I be I, my own being has to be all.
Alberto García Alix does not portray a certain way of living, but rather certainty – just what he sees, what grabs him. With each portrait, he lets us partake in another life and share a sense of intimacy. Inevitably, this comes with a sense of modesty. He returns us to ourselves: we feel the demands, not denial, of these photographs from the skin inward. Such are the workings of his humanism.
This show sums up part of Alberto’s life and links it with those of others. Here are the people who have stayed beside him, but also those who have gone. Men and women who are truly the subjects and motives of these photographs – subjects because life speaks through them, motives because without them Alberto would have been someone else.
Forty years as forty confirmations of being, like forty nails and forty roses, each as vivid as if it were the last but also the first. Above all, the first.
Gonzalo Golpe