Portraits Mexico + Cuba

Andrés’ way to photography is to rip it apart to reveal an experience, a clearing, a freeing, a spontaneous release towards being, towards nature, as natural as Dylan’s ‘green fuse that drives the flower’ and as primal as Wordsworth’s ‘hour of splendor in the grass, and of glory in the flower,’ spontaneous release felt in being’s immanence, away from the superficialities of capitalism, its insatiable consumerism, but lost in the spontaneity of being amidst bliss and despair, and the heroic disposition towards survival. Photography which dwells and endures in the boundless, immanent, and capacious existence ever present in Mexico’s fabled, tragic tapestry, its ever-alluring mysteries torn between its mythic, spirit world, its calm ⎯ ever dreaming of its idyllic abode, its regained paradise, lost in its perennial nostalgia for what was once lyric with beingness ⎯ and the ominous, transforming, and deforming threat to Mexico’s lovely, ancient abode posed by a frantic, industrial, technological post-modern world. Andrés sublime photography, a feat, never static, but of dazzling tonal beauty, dwells in the crepuscule, liminal horizon between presence and absence, existence and non-existence. It reveals all things beyond their particular, expressing universals of sorrow and hope, the love of the motherland, expressed in dulcet gazes and embraces, weathered by time, by age, revealing, too, Mexico’s tragic spirit inwrought in light and half-light, order and chaos, insinuating a flow, a constancy, where being is always in-between things, always dwelling amidst presence and absence, truth and oblivion, and the currents of change. Andres photography is a running stream, and an embroidered web, where every contrary gathers in unity: the ever-flowing motion of all things that are not, with those that are; mirroring, capturing spontaneous moments that flow from teary chaos to harmony’s joys, from sad desolation to lofty consolation.