Pérez Siquier – Colours and Contrasts of Spain

About Carlos Pérez Siquier’s work

Carlos Pérez Siquier’s work is strongly characterized by spontaneity, an interest in the human condition, irony, and an awareness of the power of the photographic gaze. His oeuvre shares his amazement about everyday life. The exhibition provides an overview of his most important series, made between 1957 and 2018: from his earliest work in black and white, marked by incisive social critique, to his later series in colour, which show Spain in the postwar years of the Franco regime, a period during which an apparently free, modern consumer society began to emerge. Later series, in which the sharp contrasts of his early years give way to more poetic, introspective work, are also included in the exhibition. Kaarten voor deze tentoonstelling koop je via de ticketlink

Focusing on La Chanca

One of Carlos Pérez Siquier’s most striking features is his status as a ‘peripheral’ artist. He never moved to any of Spain’s important artistic centres, such as Barcelona or Madrid, but continued to live and work in his native town of Almería for his whole life. In his earliest series a poor working-class neighbourhood of this town, an area known as La Chanca, forms a recurring subject. Pérez Siquier had great admiration for the spirit of its residents and wanted to capture their dignity, their way of life and their social interaction, which dated from before the mass migration of people from the poverty-stricken countryside to the working-class districts of the larger Spanish cities. An important part of the exhibition is formed by Pérez Siquier’s photo reportage La Chanca, a series in which – first in black and white, and later in colour – he uses candid photography to document the identity of the area, looking beneath and beyond its impoverishment and neglect. He gives the people of La Chanca their own voice, and introduces a new element to the neorealist genre: a sense of humour.

A pioneer of colour photography

Another important theme in the exhibition is the use of colour. In the 1960s Pérez Siquier switched to colour film and produced intense, strongly contrasting images. His work reflects the kitsch idiom of the consumer society that was emerging due to the rise of mass tourism along the Mediterranean coast. Pérez Siquier observes this phenomenon with a mixture of interest and astonishment. He first uses colour to document La Chanca, in the series La Chanca en color (1956-1965) and lnformalismos (1965). However, the series La Playa (1972-1980), in which he zooms in on the wave of tourists surging onto the beaches of Almería and the rest of the Spanish Mediterranean coast, sealed Pérez Siquier’s reputation as a pioneer of colour photography – a medium that had hitherto enjoyed little artistic respect.

Collection presentation: Coco Capitán

Together with the retrospective of Pérez Siquier’s work, Huis Marseille is showing a selection from its own collection by the Spanish artist Coco Capitán, who enjoys an international reputation for both her autonomous and her commissioned work. In her photographic work Capitán focuses on the everyday, illuminating the strangeness and splendour that is so often overlooked, ‘actively implicating the viewer as part of her visual dialogue to the experience of connectedness that is embedded in the process of looking,’ according to her gallery Maximillian William. In this sense Capitán’s work can be seen as a contemporary counterpart of the work of Pérez Siquier.