Ruven Afanador’s gaze is not that of a documentarian: it does not record an archive of events, styles and personalities for posterity. Neither is it monumental: it does not seek to imbue its object with glamorous or photogenic qualities. Afanador’s gaze is desirous: it deforms the principle object within it, and is deformed by it. The object of desire – Buñuel and surrealism had intuited this – is dark by definition. Desiring makes us ignorant, inexpert, incompetent, because to desire is to fixate upon something ephemeral, to focus on a disappearance. Desire composes its object, and sometimes invents it, in an attempt to keep on observing it. Thus, it produces a different understanding that is subjective, infallible and revealing. The object unmasks itself in front of the eyes, and also unmasks the gaze behind them.
With an approach towards the multiverse of Andalusian folklore that is based on desire, Afanador forces it to reveal itself, and it does. As if in a dream, he brings to the surface its lapses, its deliria, the subconscious of flamenco, its palpitations of eroticism and death, its undocumentable truths. He weaves it all together in a thousand amplifications, like a grotesquely sumptuous world, an unthinkable body of light and shade. As he stares into the abyss of flamenco, he allows it to look back at him.
Our work is simply another link in the long genealogical chain of dreaming and desire: it relates (or reveals) our gaze, which is that of Ruven Afanador, looking at his models. And it speaks of photography as an astonishing phenomenon of the world that occurs in the eyes. There is no plot: there is only caprice, as in Goya’s memorable series: family themes and recognisable gestures, such as masked characters in a troupe of “caprices”, coming together in the images, as if they were calling each other, through association, analogy, attraction – or through an insatiable game of metamorphosis, both angelic and diabolical: as caprices can only express images as either miracle or devilry.