Antonio Azuaga

The Spanish artist Antonio Azuaga (b 1974) studied film and photography in Barcelona. His primary interest in photography lies in the complete abstraction of the medium of photography. Antonio Azuaga's work is based around the process of building a kind of theatre stage, where he spends days taking his images. In his studio he hangs many different coloured materials through which natural light breaks onto a central piece of „canvas". By moving around the room with his camera, finding angles of light breaking, his highly unusual abstractions are created, blurring the boundaries of painting and photography. From the beginning of photography in the late 19th Century, the medium has often defined itself through the often dramatic rivalry of painting versus photography. But abstract photography has been a small but fascinating strand, ever since the beginnings, from Henry Fox Talbot's experiments with photograms of metal gauze and lace to Moholy Nagy, Man Ray to contemporary artists like Adam Fuss or Susan Derges.

In Antonio Azuaga's work, light, colour, reflection, and time become one. Large format, almost bizarre colour fields melting into each other, are created. Azuaga's work continues a dialogue of painting and photography, calling into mind 60's American Abstraction of Morris. Louis or Helen Frankenthaler. The viewer leaves the immediate pictorial plane, diving into a world of focused and unfocused details, which seem to be in constant movement, leaving the viewer to decide what he/she wants to see. General ideas on photography such as time, documentation of reality are approached very differently in Azuaga's work. Antonio Azuaga is one the young new interesting artists to keep a lookout for.