Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés (Madrid, 1973), winner of the 2017 Fundació Vila Casas Photography Prize, presents the photography show Not like Chaos at the Can Framis Museum, curated by Glòria Bosch, director of art at the Fundació Vila Casas, and the photographer himself.

The contrast between abandoned human constructions and nature as an element that absorbs space is the main axis of this exhibition where the artist presents a series of images taken over several years on trips to fifteen countries in four continents.  Fate, decadence, melancholy and solitude are the central themes of this selection of photographs which invites us on a mysterious journey across remote and unknown scenes towards our own interior world, leading us to discover, by a process of introspection, a silent and harmonically confused reality.

Not like chaos treats us to the chance to contemplate a compositional balance that transmits peace. Horizontal lines that dialogue with the vertical ones and converge with other perpendiculars, carefully chosen by the lens. And lines that combine in apparently random compositions. Images set in ideal chromatic atmospheres, each more exquisite than the last. The result does not spring from the use of a retouching program, but from the innate ability of a watchful eye.

The topics raised by Sánchez-Montañés have to do with the human being, nature, dependence and the struggle between all of these and the passing of time. Some of the images are tremendously aesthetic, as if everything fitted together in a pleasantly harmonious puzzle; others appeal to the absurdity of human intervention, while counterpointed by their architectural astuteness. Some evoke silence; others solitude. Whatever the case, most likely they will provoke a reaction.

You are invited to consider them with the time and attention they deserve. To understand the artist through his gaze. To discuss what he offers us, to think about how man invades nature and how nature resists, how it fights for the natural space that has been taken from it at some point. To laugh at ourselves before pictures that border on the absurd, like Ducha(Shower), in which water flowing from a beach shower is soaked up by the structure of a giant elephant on a beach at Marina d’Or. Or to contemplate how a couple of pink walls stand in an inhospitable sandy desert in Namibia; or the tennis court on the slopes of a mountain, whose neglected net has seen better days – though one should wonder, better for who?

Our analysis will depend on the position from which we view the photographs: from a standpoint of aesthetics, out of a sense of practicality, the emotion they cause in us, criticism or self-criticism of our own values and concerns.(Fundacio Vilacasas press-release)