How many times have we seen loneliness interpreted? Are you tired? I'm tired too, you know. And the neighbor, no doubt. But how many times do we feel loneliness? How many times do we not even know that we feel it? This is just one more exhibition. Because there are as many points of view as there are people watching and I am one more.  With my backpack and sneakers, I continue to move forward. As I suppose most people do. Like it or not. The world continues to turn. Are you coming?

To Marta. For more people like you.

Thank you.

Sofía Montes

 

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Sofía Montes has been doing analogue photography since she was little. She has all the Polaroids that have been on the market since the 1990s, and when she was young, thanks to the artistic influence of her family, she quickly equipped herself with an analog SLR camera to express her creativity. She has always been interested in the world of black and white, and from the age of 13 she learned to develop photographs in a course, usually intended for adults, but she was finally admitted thanks to her cover letter.

 

At the same time, she keeps trying to capture the present moment. She grew up with the great technological advances and the exponential increase in the pixels of digital cameras, but quickly decided to focus on simpler options (there was a time when two megapixels were more than enough...) and to express herself through a smartphone. In her artistic approach, she does not seek quality, she seeks, above all, feelings.

 

After studying and working with great photography professionals and trying out all the possibilities offered by new technologies, she decided a year ago to return to the sources of her work: simple snapshots taken in the urgency of the moment with her smartphone and 35mm camera.

 

For the first time, Sofía Montes presents the series "La vida es hermosa no entiendo el veneno" (Life is beautiful, I do not understand its poison) : seven diptychs where photographs are opposed or speak together in a mysterious and poetic language; it is up to everyone to see the correspondences...

 

Her snapshots are urban haikus that synthesize the essence and vestiges of life's journey, collisions of an ultra-modern society that distils, despite its fascination, a certain venom that may cause suffocation.

 

But make no mistake about it! One might think that these are insignificant details of lives, destined to go unnoticed in the loneliness of dehumanized megacities. This is precisely where the artist's gaze resides: through the intensity of the moment she captures with her mobile phone or camera, Sofía Montes sacralizes these vestiges of life and underlines their breath. Without these witnesses, life would only be lonely and it is precisely the accumulation of these details that formulates its counter-poison: "la vida es hermosa"...

 

Sofía Montes lives and works in Madrid.