Milan, Fondazione Prada, Charlie Koolhaas (2021) perfectly exemplifies Patrik Grijalvo‘s work. To make the work owe only itself to itself is an old ideal of modern art: to cut the ties that bind it to natural reality and let it stand, all contained within its pure limits.

To take up this venerable pretension without falling into abstraction and, moreover, to do it from the photographic medium seems almost impossible. But Patrik Grijalvo has found a way to shore up the autonomy of his images. He weakens their link with the real referent -without losing it- and thus vindicates their condition as objects.

In his hands they become sculptures: pieces of a delicate and subtle volume, achieved by a serene composition of planes. The result, far from being capricious or redundant, transmits a harmonious sensation of necessity.

The artist does not impose any three-dimensional form on the images, at his whim. Rather, he constructs it from the attributes of the photographic surface. One of the peculiarities of photography is the focus, which forces to discriminate areas of variable sharpness and, therefore, to mark the various planes of depth.