Juan Ballester Carmenates

Juan Pablo Ballester graduated in 1990 from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, Cuba, and was member of the artistic group Grupo ABTV from 1988 to 1991.

[3] [note 2] In his first years in Madrid, Ballester experienced the difficult experience of emigration and the need for integration, at the same time that he came into contact with the exotic tropical that surrounds the Spanish and European vision of his birthplace.

During these years Ballester began working on a series of photographs documenting an ephemeral performance event about his identity, for which he used strategies such as appropriation, collage, manipulation and the use of the artist's body as a visual symbol.

The experiences reflected in his photographs refer to complex formulations that mix the physical, the biographical and the intimate but placing special emphasis on the sexed nature of all actions and on the consideration that even the most private aspect has a political or ideological interpretation".

[4] In 1994 he moved to Barcelona, where his experience of emigration would intensify when he was confronted with a society engaged in the search, construction and reaffirmation of an National identity encouraged from within government structures to differentiate itself from the Spanish state and the European context in which it finds itself submerged.

In these works, Ballester reveals the iconography of internal, external Catalans and Xarnegos as fundamental to the visual definition of national identity that is supported by a variety of photographic genres, from advertising to postcards of monuments and snapshots of tourists.

Ballester also used casting models from advertising agencies dressed as Mossos d'Esquadra (local police) as a fashion report in landscape settings – idyllic and idealized – prototypical of Catalan Noucentisme painting but using techniques that are common to many neo-objectivist photographers: long shots and centered camera positions, geometric composition, occasional subjects, as well as the symbolic load of the spaces chosen to transmit multiple layers of meaning.