Alejandro Guijarro

Alejandro Guijarro (b. 1979, Madrid) lives and works between London and Madrid.  He graduated with MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2010 and works primarily with photography, questioning its ability to refer to reality or truth. His work examines spatial relations in photographic representation, exploring what photography is still allowed and able to do. Alejandro Guijarro's Momentum series of works are to-scale photographs of blackboards in academic institutions all over the world that specialize in quantum mechanics: Oxford, Berkeley, Stanford, Cern. The blackboards, photographed with a large format camera in an emptied lecture hall, are presented face-on, frameless, their roiled surfaces reminiscent of mid-century abstract painting (Twombly, Pollock, even Rothko). The dynamic abstract forms of scuffed chalk and dragged erasers might allude, as those painted precursors might, to the expressive power of the individual gesture, even a yearning towards the sublime: something inexpressible, beyond the limited range of language. No accident, therefore, that Guijarro chooses the study of quantum mechanics as his subject - the study of the physics of the microscopically small, whose very formulae are expressed in abstract terms.