San Juan el Santo Pagano / Soria a foot from heaven.
Spain 1997 - 1998.
FINALIST "II Contest of Plastic Arts of the Villalar-Castilla y León Foundation" Seat of the Courts of Castilla y León. Valladolid, Spain. 2009.
FINALIST "VIII Festival of San Juan Contest, 98" . Caja Duero Exhibition Hall, Soria. Spain. 1998.
2nd Prize VII Contest "Fiestas de San Juan, 97" Caja Duero, Soria. Spain. 1997.
"A look from the other shore"
(Fragments of the book "San Juan el Santo Pagano. Soria 1998")
Soria explodes, once a year, in joy, noise, rejoicing, hubbub and revelry. San Juan must forgive, from the heights, more than an excess caused by that amalgam of sweat, wine, music, dance, blood and bulls that spills throughout the city….
…. Ney's camera has participated in all the vicissitudes of the parties from within, and has done so with insolence, with impudence, with that shamelessness that characterizes race reporters. And here is the result. A whirlwind of pulsating, trembling, expressionist images, endowed with a communicative energy that explodes on paper, all of them captured with the nervous style of improvisation, lit up in a delirious crowd….
…. The brief treatment of the bullfight in this collection of images refers us to a Goyesque look, of mysterious suggestions in the shadows, where, interviewed sets are
incomplete shows, where the fragmentation of space and compositional risk that flees from the explicit prevails….
…. I wonder if, paraphrasing Frank, this book could define, in its complexity and in the multiplicity of its portraits, a way of being different from the Sorians. Contrary to the Swiss photographer, who immersed himself in the monotonous, gray and everyday life of the citizens of North America for two years. Ney has portrayed the resurrection of the flesh, an ecstasy, a state of grace, a madness, a transfiguration. All this concentrated in a place and at a specific time –The 1998 San Juan Festivities in Soria-….
…. He wanted to come to this naked conclusion. To affirm, bluntly, that this book by José Ney is, in addition and above all, the work of a visual poet.
Lorenzo Soler.
In Calatañazor (Soria) and Barcelona, 1999.