Exhibition «Blanco. Nacho Criado»

PHotoESPAÑA 2025 revisits the work of one of the most complex and radical creators on the Spanish scene: Nacho Criado. Under the title «Blanco», the exhibition offers a journey through his early photographic investigations carried out between 1970 and 1975, where the image is not only a document, but also material for thought.

Criado, awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 2009, used photography as a critical tool in a stifling political context: the final years of Francoism. Far from any form of academicism, his work engages with arte povera, minimalism, land art and conceptual processes, but does not fit fully into any of them. Blanco takes as its axis a work originally presented in 1974 at the Instituto Alemán de Madrid. The piece, which played with the alternation between positive and negative, serves here as the starting point for a broader investigation into photography as gesture, as trace, as action suspended in time.

More than images, this exhibition unfolds an archaeology of visual thought. A terrain where language is interrupted, repeated, transformed, and where each image stops representing in order to begin revealing. Criado does not seek to capture the world: he questions it from within.