The Tamarinds of La Concha together five photographic series made by Ricardo Cases in San Sebastian from an artistic residency proposed by Kutxa Fundazioa in 2024.

These works constitute an extension of the urban research initiated by in 2018 in the city of Valencia, and which was brought together in 2023 under the title El ficus del Parterre. Now under the name The Tamarinds of La Concha to those brief photographic essays are added those made in Donostia.

The new series Umbrellas and Flowers, Serie D, Plastic bags on bicycle saddles, Bus stop shelters ythe one that gives title to the project -along with those made in Valencia- are the result of a way of working different from the idea of long-term photographic project that Ricardo Cases has developed for more than a decade to delve into the cultural features of rural Levante. A stage of intense reflection and critical look at a particular and close territory is followed by this other liberating one, heir to the immediacy required by his work as a photojournalist in the city at the beginning of his practice. Ricardo Cases turns his gaze towards the city and composes in it a series of short phrases full of magical everyday life. The closeness, the emotional reaction to what he finds by chance along the way become his new guide.

Without a previous program, the photographer carries out a daily exercise in which he pushes the usual compositional approaches to the limit, relying on resources that appear spontaneously, such as balloons, bicycle seats or bus shelters. Ricardo Cases insists on the duration of the photographic gesture, emphasizes it and recreates himself in each scene, often circling it until he exhausts it, until he consumes the possibilities offered by an event. This grammar of movement, as in an athletic exercise, registers the unexpected, the irregularities of the terrain, the collisions and changes of rhythm and creates a mosaic of small details that build a whole.

The city is a stimulus, it reveals itself as a fertile place to explore the limits of the image and play with estrangement, but without the pretension of offering a passive and aseptic vision. His intention is also to address cultural and social issues, and to this end he proposes symbols that explore the character and identity of those who inhabit the landscape.

Ricardo Cases’ work consists precisely in maintaining a commitment to socio-cultural circumstances and at the same time pushing the limits of observation. In illuminating, sharing with us his experience of the visible world and inviting us to recompose the pieces of a possible puzzle of reality.

With the support of