Escape and Return | 2019
Artist's Proof is pleased to announce the Artsy Exclusive exhibition, Escape and Return featuring 12 photographs created between 2018 and 2019 by Spanish photographer Pedro Correa. Born in Madrid in 1977, Pedro Correa moved to Brussels at the age of 14, where he studied oil painting and comic art at the Brussel's Royal Academy of Arts in parallel with a Ph.D. in image processing at the University of Engineering of Louvain. In his artistic development, Pedro Correa soon became fascinated by photography and the possibility to capture the poetic and fragile scene that came to life for only a split second.
Influenced by his impressionistic painting background (his mother is also a painter), his style was born by experimenting with ways of injecting the emotions of impressionism into the "decisive moment" of photography, without manipulating or digitally retouching the image. He soon became able to create a body of work that transcends what lies in plain sight, by giving as much importance to a rigorous composition of the image as to the subtle and invisible atmosphere that is part of the scene.
After leaving his day job as a Project Manager in a multinational corporation in 2012 in order to become a full-time fine art photographer, he created his most transversal body of work, Urban Impressions, as a manifest to reconnect with the invisible and the present moment, in order to find the beauty that surrounds us without us noticing it. In 2017 the Washington Post critic defined this series as "seeking universal qualities of city life."
Urban Impressions Series
Photography is Pedro Correa’s way of attesting to the city’s attraction: “All my pictures are love songs to the city. Not any particular one, but rather the universal idea of a city. Photos that depict the mix of various cultures, people bumping into each other, colors, energy, things happening on every corner…” Pedro Correa comes so close that names become irrelevant. “Exactly! My migration, my search, my work, and my eye have evolved beyond the surface and have moved to works aimed at the spirit of the global, nameless, and placeless city. It’s my perception of the city that I want to show, the feeling rather than an actual picture.”
Correa never manipulates his photographs, simply framing real moments using clever, layered compositions. “ I use levels, and I do post process my photographs, but i never erase parts, detour, copy-paste or add layers. Those layers are already in the image. I work a lot with reflection and superimposition but using reality itself, things that are there that exist, like shades, reflections, grain, dust, and the texture in general. Again the things that often go unnoticed.” The attention to light, reflections – veils cast over reality- soon make clear what Pedro Correa seeks to express in his photography.
“I like to underline what is not obvious, what would be worth getting a bit more attention. There is beauty to be found everywhere, even in the things that you might consider ugly at first. This doesn’t require the manipulation of reality. It is capturing a specific moment that is not constructed but which is just there. To me, that can only be transmitted through impressionism, by adding feeling to the decisive moment. that way you get a story in a single image, something of a mystery.” - Excerpt from Agenda Magazine, by Kurt Snoeckx