Jordi Bernadó: Welcome to Espaiñ Great Travellers (3)
An anonymous hand-graffitied ‘Welcome to Espaiñ’ on an industrial container that Jordi Bernadó saw in Barcelona. A graffiti that gives rise to the title of a series of photographs in which the artist captures nondescript spaces around Spain. Portrayed frontally and in close-up, using a format that evokes documentary photography’s supposedly aseptic style, the artist revisits all the clichés of Spanish culture with an ironic, yet affectionate gaze. The result is a journey through contemporary Spain, with derelict buildings and collapsing walls, closed brothels and truncated roads that lead nowhere. One of the images in the series presents us with a desolate landscape with an old rubber floor mat from a car and a brick wall on which someone has painted, with well-defined letters, the word ‘glamour’. It is precisely the glamour of the archetype that Bernadó wants us to see in his unique travel book.
