[ Spanish version ]
Pradiauto Madrid
May 7th - July 4th, 2025
BLANCA GUERRERO
“La oscuridad es negra. Así es como la vemos, sabemos que está. Así es como dejamos de ver lo que esconde. Pero la oscuridad no es una presencia – o ausencia – estática y total. La mirada se ajusta a sus condiciones, y así aparecen grados, siluetas, distinciones—entrevemos. Descubrimos algo que antes no veíamos: donde antes había solo oscuridad ahora hay luz, forma, color. La oscuridad resulta no ser, después de todo, un sinónimo de negritud.”
Guillermo Izquierdo, abril 2025
A contraluz is Blanca Guerrero (Madrid, 1990) first solo show at Pradiauto gallery in Madrid. The exhibition consists of a selection of oil paintings and analog photographs created in the past few years, marking the consolidation of a language that is as open as it is secret.
There’s a moment when a landscape sort of slips away — right before night properly falls. That’s the kind of space Blanca Guerrero is working in. A contraluz, her new exhibition at Pradiauto, doesn’t really offer clarity. It holds you in this in-between zone — less about “seeing” a scene, more about adjusting to it, like your eyes are still catching up.
The title — A contraluz — says a lot without really pinning anything down. It literally means “backlit,” but it also suggests something seen from the wrong side of the light. A figure or space made indistinct by too much illumination. The Spanish poet-philosopher María Zambrano, whose work moved between mysticism, exile, and poetic reason, once wrote that “clarity doesn’t reside in light, but in the shadow where light gathers itself.” Guerrero’s work lives precisely in that shadow — not as absence, but as a dense and sensitive space where vision becomes less about recognition and more about intuition.
Working across photography and painting, Guerrero leans into dark, murky tones — earthy greens, blacks, greys. The photos (Morcuera, Dehesa, Famara) don’t try to stage dramatic landscapes. They’re more like fragments or impressions — places half-held in memory. The paintings follow the same logic: blurred edges, surfaces worn down or wiped back, as if something was there but didn’t stay.
There’s never a clear vantage point. These images don’t offer a horizon to hang onto. They’re close, low, sometimes a bit lost. The usual idea of perspective — of the viewer being “outside” the image — doesn’t really apply here. You’re in it, part of the fog or the darkness.
It’s not just about depicting a landscape. It’s more about how we move through them, or how they stay with us. There’s something temporal in the work — about time passing, about things fading. Like trying to remember a place you haven’t been to in years. Or the way light lingers just after it disappears.
In the end, there’s a kind of tenderness in all this murkiness. The show doesn’t explain itself. It just sitswith you. And slowly, your eyes begin to adjust.
Tony Tremlett, May 2025
Traducción de Ana Larrea
