A man cleans the windows of the Mies van der Rohe pavilion in Barcelona one morning in 1999. The morning sun illuminates the room and also brings light to the pond behind with Morgen, the statue of, in the background.
A street in Vancouver in the year 2000. A sunny day. People walk around in summer clothes. Cars are parked on both sides of the road. A man bends down, pretends to have a rifle in his hands, points at passers-by.
A derelict staircase in Prague in 1984. A woman walks down, to her right is a fountain that may no longer be giving water.
A leafy forest with a small clearing in which stands out a smoking pot burning on some logs. Around him, clothes and other utensils. To the left of the black and white image, an old woman running from her back.
These are some of the images by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall (Vancouver, 1946) that make up the exhibition Contes possibles, which can be visited from today until October 13 at La Virreina in Barcelona.
Possible stories is the best title to summarize the work of Wall, the artist who photographs what could have been. Wall works like painters, recreating beforehand and in great detail the scene he wants to portray. But he is not a painter. He works with the camera and this brings him closer to photojournalism, because his images are loaded with reality, even though they are not real. He works by composing the scenes as if on a cinematographic set and thus his work approaches the seventh art, even though it is not cinema. He works with everyday and descriptive themes and is thus framed in something similar to a documentary.
Wall is a multidisciplinary artist who tries to capture “the spectrum of modern life through situations that are not real facts, but the fruit of possibility and imagination”, as the artist explained yesterday during the presentation of exhibition at La Virreina, where he was accompanied by the exhibition’s curator, Jean-François Chevrier, and the artistic director of the Rambla exhibition space, Valentín Roma.
In that modern life it is common to have a mobile phone and capture images instantly in thousandths of a second. Wall’s photographs are far removed from this dynamic. The artist captures four or five images at full stretch in a year.
It is his way of emphasizing the autonomy of each of his works: “Each of the photos I take is unique. Art has limits and the uniqueness of the image is a way of showing it. The same as the scenes I reflect, because they are situations that have never existed, but could have existed”, added Jeff Wall.
This singularity is enhanced thanks to the format in which Wall presents his work, large paintings or photographic paintings. La Virreina’s exhibition features 35 photographs taken between 1980 and 2022. It is a broad representation of the work of the artist, who began taking his unique photos in 1978 and has so far produced only 200 works .
The exhibition traces those four decades of art with early works such as Insomnia (1994), in which a man appears lying on the kitchen floor unable to fall asleep, and recent photographs such as Maquette (2023 ), which shows a woman sitting in a library checking to see if a sock needs patching.
