On almost every night of the last 20 years, the versatile photographer Carlos Puig Padilla has been seen with a small camera on his shoulder. New York, London, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona have been the main scenes of the permanent love affair of the artist’s objective with the characters that swarmed around him.
A consensual flirtation in which the Catalan and Parisian by adoption elevates the motto that summarizes his life to the category of art: “Distributing happiness.” An immense joy for living that is exuded in each of the 56 photographs that make up the Friends exhibition that opens Thursday night at The A Studio, a new multidisciplinary space by interior designer Marta Catalán, at 19 Mèxic Street, in Barcelona.
The exhibition is a celebration, a permanent party where the characters are elusive, sometimes cheeky and almost always without complexes.
At night, at these parties, Puig Padilla becomes invisible. “I like that they don’t see me, that my friends act around me with absolute naturalness without poses or postures; just as they are,” he explains to La Vanguardia, while he finishes preparing the room helped by the artist Paul Ekaitz.
This is not his first photography exhibition, but it is the most important. In the last year, Puig Padilla selected from thousands of images from the last two decades that narrate friendship in black and white.
There are characters who repeat snapshots. The actress Bibiana Fernández or the actress Rossy de Palma need more than one photograph. They are family, the author’s foster home in infinite moments of his life. With them, as with Martina Klein or Nieves Álvarez, Puig Padilla has shared confidences, love and life.
Without intending it, the gaze leaves and stays on the happy faces of Bimba Bosé and David Delfín, friends of the author and who, night and night, played with their goal. Full of life, the actress and the designer revive immortals in the new multidisciplinary space.
The exhibition is a living memory of the last two decades of a night and parties attended with greed for debauchery. A document in which the protagonists, some especially popular and others simple anonymous, receive the same treatment, being important in the author’s life.
In this work, Puig Padilla wishes to emulate the American journalist and photographer Bob Colacello who, with his small Minox camera, photographed thousands of people at the parties he attended with Andy Warhol: Diana Vreeland having dinner with Norman Mailer, Warhol taking a polaroid of Willy Brandt , Truman Capote in Studio 54, Diane Von Furstenberg undressed before a wedding…
There is an intentional intensity of the black and white printed on the paper, with great sought-after contrasts that, to the joy of the protagonists, softens the faces, freeing them from any mark.
In this work, the author seeks to dust off the nights, show the intimate, the hidden, the forbidden and clandestine. With the small Canon on his shoulder, and his shameless and sparkling curiosity, the photographer has been printing memory of the moments that happen before his gaze and that he has retained as fragments of those happy, crazy, wild moments. and disheveled.
“Never miss a party, they are good for the nerves, like celery,” Francis Scott Fitgerald recommended. And Carlos Puig Padilla has followed the advice to the letter.
