Tenemos que revolucionar nuestra comprensión óptica. Tenemos que quitarnos el velo que tenemos delante de los ojos y ver más allá del ombligo. Las perspectivas más interesantes del presente son aquellos que van desde arriba hacia abajo, desde abajo hacia arriba, y sus diagonales.

– Aleksander Rodchenko

Which is to say (translation mine): “We must revolutionize our optical understanding. We must remove the veil we have before our eyes and look beyond our navels. The most interesting perspectives of today are those than come from up to down, down to up, and their diagonals.”

Rodchenko is best known as a painter. He was part of the constructivist movement in Russia, and lived during the Russian revolution. His photography really does take to heart the quote I transcribed up there (which, I should note, was probably in French or Russian, and almost definitely not in Spanish; all of the photos were labeled in French and Spanish). This exhibition, at the Fundación Canal, north in the Plaza de Castilla, was really excellent — the best single-artist exhibition I’ve seen since I’ve been in Madrid, certainly.

You can read a bit about it (in Spanish; there are two other photos there); I’m not going to try to sum up what little I know about the guy, considering that most of it is gleaned from wikipedia. But the exhibition I can discuss. I like the Fundación Canal — they have two really interesting exhibition spaces, the one just north of the center, in an old water tower; the other is this one, in the business-heavy Plaza de Castilla, also next to a water tower. (The water towers aren’t accidental — Canal is the water-management organization for Madrid, more than 150 years old.) The Rodchenko exhibition was in the basement of this building, but was perfectly-lit, with brief and interesting (and legible!) wall-text, and actually was intriguingly-effected by the basement-ness, since one part of the gallery had beautiful brickwork encroaching from one side.

Besides the technicalities of it, the photography was also really good. I am curious to see more of his painting, but Rodchenko’s photography is really cool. The photo up top was possibly my favorite, but there were a lot of fantastic portraits, and even his landscape and building photography was intriguing — he’s not kidding about diagonals, oh no sir. All in all, I’m a fan.