A great part of our visual education is encoded in the landscape. We soon learn to read it, interpret it and we become sensitive to the emotions it awakens. What is more, at some point, we start translating emotions into landscapes.

In North, Jon Gorospe (b.1986 Vitoria-Gasteiz. Spain)  explores the symbolic and transcendental tradition of landscape to bring it up to date and to speak from that angle. Not only is landscape present in his images as a subject, but also – and above all – as an embracing space that refers constantly to vastness: the vastness of what is huge and the vastness of our inner self.

The inner reality that Gorospe aims at and which he unfolds in this series is at once enigmatic and tumultuous. He has used a particular idea of the sacred on more than one occasion in order to refer to it, this being the assembly of beauty and terror (Rilke) or of beauty and its revelations (the epiphanies it provokes).

In order to do this, Gorospe turns to a series of black and white landscapes alternating several colour photographs in which the only thing we can distinguish are transitions between colours. These gradients have a twofold function. On one hand, just like a map’s legend, they are the key to the series: they provide us with the coordinates that guide its interpretation. On the other hand, they also represent something ethereal and formless, a beyond, a behind.

Another element with a strategic role is present in the landscape images: scale, or rather the absence of it, also understood as its dissolution from the perspective of fractal geometry. That which is big and that which is small are intertwined and indistinct but equally vertiginous, equally out of reach. Ruén Á. Arias