OCEANS OF SAND

“The travelling photographer, Luis Vioque, did not create this series of photographs too far away from home. He took these pictures in the dunes of Maspalomas en Gran Canaria between 2007 and 2008. It was a chance meeting, almost sublime, with nature at its most imposing and real, right in front of his eyes. The Japanese photographer Shoji Ueda was an artist who influenced Luis Vioque, especially with his work on dunes. Over a period of more than forty years dunes were the main topic of Ueda’s works, his “theatre of dunes” in Tottori or near his house in Sakaiminato. However, for Shoji Ueda the dunes were used as the perfect landscape to decontextualize his figures, a neutral backdrop with pure air and sky. We also find an element of this in Luis Vioque’s deserts. He depicts vast and empty spaces, where under our searching gaze nothingness turns into something. And suddenly we really see, we identify furrows in the sand, threatening shadows, tiny hints of vegetation, different shapes made by the millions of minuscule grains of sand which, like molecules, give life to these figures and continually make them move and change. Our uneducated mind does not know how to look without trying to identify an object, without trying to rationalise what we see. But here, that is not possible.” Virginia de la Cruz Lichet