Josmanuelballester

Le Corbusier, the architect formerly known as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, used to defend his buildings as “machines for living.” By extension, noted the critic Ada Louise Huxtable, the city is better seen as the “machine for living” because as much as we shape it as builders and inhabitants, it shapes us as human beings. Above all, the city must be livable.

The city and its buildings are the main subject of the work of José Manuel Ballester’s explorations in painting and photography. Ballester, who was trained as a restorer of Flemish and Italian Old Masters, brings to photography a wealth of visual knowledge of technique and the history of representation of architecture. He writes, “If we cannot change the world, at least we can change the way we see it.” This is the guiding mantra of his photography and painting. Ballester has come of age as an artist at the conflux of two significant trends in photography: the rise of the giant-scale photograph as the accepted token of art photography and the use of computer-enhanced imagery that also makes possible these massive photographs that have come to represent the new painting. It can be argued that Ballester is merely following in the footsteps of such recognized photographers as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer of the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf and, for example, Jeff Wall, of Canada, who have combined digital elements in their photography on a scale both massive and massively successful in the art market. The argument breaks down when Ballester’s subject matter and its articulation are examined.

Ballester’s true subject is the city and its buildings. He is far more interested in the hard machinery of space and architecture than in those soft machines called people. His images are, typically, reductionist, Mark Rothko-like rectangles of receding passageways and doors. At times he desaturates the colors in his images and gives them an unearthly depth. We wonder what is going on in the images, what has happened, what will happen next, and, above all, where are the protagonists? The uncanny spaces flirt with our imagination and demand we supply the narratives for those not yet strutting about his empty urban stage. At other times, he plays with volumes or, through digital manipulation, accentuates the colors as in images from nocturnal Times Square or Shenzhen in ways impossible before the advent of the computer and Photoshop.

His use of photography refers back and forth to his continued practice of painting. Indeed, he often outputs his images onto linen making it difficult to determine whether we are looking at a photograph or a painting. Ballester’s use of subdued lighting, or the post-production desaturation of color values, references Titian in his control of interior architectural space. His passages seem to lead through infinite, timeless spaces where unseen terrors and pleasures, or, perhaps nothing at all await us. Ballester’s deliberate, painterly manipulation is an important aspect of contemporary art practice, but the questions he poses to modern architecture and the spaces we inhabit set him apart from those who simply depict spaces. Ballester’s work is indeed painterly and often melancholic. It does not reflect actual objective reality, per se. A true artist never does. Rather, Ballester’s work is highly subjective, almost hyper-real in its details yet it represents a critique of modern society and the almost inhuman scale of contemporary city planning whose politics and economics produce the buildings we are forced to inhabit.

Ballester takes up this challenge by making us aware of the ramifications of our surroundings. To cite him again, “If we cannot change the world, at least we can change the way we see it.” Ballester lends us his eyes and his talents, that we may see what we all too often overlook.