Chema Madoz: Visual metaphors

Last year I visited the exhibition entitled "Chema Madoz" 2000-2005. Madoz is a point of reference in Spain's contemporany art scene because of his unique way of interpreting art trough photography and his searching of visual poetry.

This artist manipulates the objects with studied delicacy. He modifies the objects looking for a balance between the essence of things and their latent significance.

Madoz is a incredible and fascinating collector of ideas that he photographes in black and white. This artist, with his poetic vision provides us with a window to better understand the world around us. As Confucious says: "Everyting has its beauty, but not everyone can see it".

Madoz uses the objecs and his graphic representation as if they were words froma very clear vocabulary. Madoz worked with Joan Brossa on a book (Fotopoemario), and Madoz's work has also been compared to the visual poems of this catalan poet.

The black-and-white format lends a melancholy distante to his work. The scale of greys turns things into shadows. The work with shadows allows the artist to obtain a plastic elegance in his photographs. Chema Madoz works on the delicate border existing between the real and the imaginary. In his works he proposes to us a split between whats exits and what is possible. As usually happen in the plastic arts, what is intellectual in Madoz's work is precisely what is abstract. Madoz has produced images with such a clear surrealist content, that remember the work of Magritte.

Uncanny, but real story

Real life is more impressive than fiction. How many times have you have listen to the sentence “reality exceeds fiction”?
It is difficult for me to imagine an uncanny story, but it is not necessary to imagine one, you can simply swim into daily news to find uncanny, terrible or touching stories.

Chris Biblis was sixteen when doctors diagnosed him leukemia and told him that he needed radiotherapy, and this treatment would leave him sterile and doctors advise him that if he ever wanted to become a father he would need to freeze his sperm before the treatment, so he decided to do it.

Now, he is 38 years old and he and his wife are celebrating the birth of a healthy baby daughter Stella, who was conceived after scientist injected a defrosted sperm into an egg of his wife, Melodie, and implanted it in the uterus.

Five remaining eggs have been fertilized and are now frozen for possible usy by the couple in the future, if they want to have more children. This is a touching story with a promising end because Chris lives 22 years after doctors communicated him his leukemia. He has overcome his illness as well as this year he has celebrated the birth of Stella, his daughter.

A joke about computers

Here is joke for us:
A SPANISH Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike
English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.
"House" for instance, is feminine: >"la casa."
“Pencil," however, is masculine: el lapiz...”
A student asked, “What gender is 'computer'?"
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two
groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether
"computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun.
Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.
The men's group decided that “computer” should definitely be of the…..
feminine gender ("la computadora"), because:
1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is
incomprehensible to everyone else;
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for
possible later retrieval;
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending
half your pay check on accessories for it.
(THIS GETS BETTER!)
The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine
("el computador"), because:
1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;
2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves;
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they
ARE the problem; and
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a
little longer, you could have gotten a better model.
The women won.

Susan Boyle

This morning I was listening to the radio and I started to become interested in a new about Susan Boyle's video with millions of hits on You Tube.
This woman surprised the judges and audience on TV's Britain's Got Talent with a strong perfomance of "I dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables. Ms Boyle has now become the favourite to win the talent show. Her life will never be the same after that.
She was born with a disability and she was offended when she was a child in school. She asked the teachers for help, but she never received their support. She says "words often hurts more than cuts and bruises and the scares are still there".
She told viewers she had "never been kissed", said she had always wanted to be a singer. Susan Boyle has had a small life. She lives in the same house where she lived with her parents. She was raised there and still sleeps in the same room she did as a child. Susan Boyle, is currently unemployed, is a keen church-goer and community worker who is well-known for her karaoke perfomances. Susan Boyle's story shows us that prejudices are unfair, and that very often big talents are socially rejected.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY