The Dreamers is proud to bring to West Texas the work of French photographer Abel Llavall-Ubach for his first solo exhibition in the US. Presenting 17 photographs spanning 17 years, Ghosts of Our Humanities is a slow-paced, quiet and somber reverie capturing the gently haunting atmospheres of places found deserted.
The identity and motives of those who left is not the focus here; rather, emphasis is given to what remains. Lonesome statues, still waves and overgrown trees, an empty street graced by the sun. Though at first one might be tempted to catalog the works in this exhibition as simple landscapes, viewers willing to pause and intimately converse with the photographs might start to perceive their more complex nature.
Famed for his subdued portraits that humbly exude both the emotional and the stern (e.g. Mathias Kiss or Barbara Chase-Riboud for The New York Times Style Magazine), Llavall-Ubach is, after all, a virtuoso at capturing the essence and soul of all things, living and inanimate. Therefore, are these empty streets and forgotten monuments indeed landscapes, or have they become ghosts through our humanity, our love, loss, and sorrows? Could they be the portraits of our now vanished emotions? Together, the photographs constitute a deeply personal form of meditation, blurring spatial and temporal landmarks in a melancholic and contemplative atmosphere – the signature of the artist’s photographic vision.
