Ricardo Cases_Pigeon in the air_03/18/11_05/03/11_Dossier

Works of Ricardo Cases are always related to the yearnings of the human being: the deep and universal aspirations of the citizen of the mass society fight against banality in an effort to transcend and confront his dignity to a medium always little glorious. For this, he looks at the expressions of contemporary folklore, seeking the truth of the Spanish, understood as a man of the countryside forced to live in the city, in modernity. Beyond a pop appearance, detached and cynical, he is interested in the human and the anthropological. Beyond the social and documentary side, he is interested in the sincere and universal and universal drives that beat under the banal, kitsch, and the unglamorous surface of contemporary Spain.

This new project (Pigeon in the air) -made next of “Outskirts Beauty” where it approached the aspirations of the human being through a study of the aesthetic evolution of the working class- it borns from the intention of debugging his work, looking for a topic away from the present and from the social to focus on the metaphoric. The proximity to the subject (the center of the Racing Pigeon Sport is in the Spanish Levante, from which is native from) facilitates the understanding of code and access to the events that constitute the raw material, at the same time showing that he can find material of I work in the closest thing and apparently simple.

The reduced world of pigeon fancying is for the photographer a scale model that reproduces a whole view of life. Without the pigeon-breeders being totally conscious, their activity brings into play elements such as sex, flying, competition, the illusion, the triumph or failure. In the rustic scenarios of the Levantine garden, metaphors arise by themselves. The domestic scale of a rural and quite marginal hobby, the pigeon racing offers us images of yearning and hope that, taken out of context, they charge one greater universal sense. Men looking at the sky, staring at the flight of their pigeon, their projectile of life: their bet, their bullet, their lottery ticket.

The anthropological observation of ritual play, exercised by adults in a developed society, also raises questions about the reality of what we live and our form of symbolic perception.

The plastic treatment is based, in the line of all his photographic work, in a colorful, abrupt and ironic look that creates a distance, an alienated vision that transcends the document and forces the metaphorical reading.