Gonzalo Puch

From Painting to Sculpture to Photography: Recording Temporary Scenes

Puch was born in Seville in 1950. He began with painting and gradually moved toward work combining sculpture and photography. Banco de España describes this transition as the development of scenes in which figures temporarily “inhabit” fragile foam-board architecture and objects that exist only for the moment of the photograph^*1. A UCLM biography likewise identifies the construction of situations he calls “incidentes” in neutral spaces such as classrooms and homes, later presented as large photographic prints, as a basic feature of his work^*4.

A long 2018 interview gives a more specific account of this transition in Puch’s own terms. Around 1986, when he began teaching at the University of Cuenca, he found himself unable to stop attaching objects to paintings. He felt a growing mismatch between his intuition and the act of “making painting,” and bought a camera almost on impulse^*26. Over the next four years, the canvas disappeared. Iron, wood, and painted structures appeared on floors and walls, while photographs entered the same environment. In his 1991 solo exhibition at Galería Buades, illuminated structures and photographs occupied a shared, unstable space^*26. The camera did not simply replace painting with another flat medium. In Puch’s words, “the studio became portable.” It became a tool for bringing together, as an image, temporary configurations of sculpture, action, fire, water, and bodily movement that could be assembled and carried to another place^*26.

During the 1990s, staged photography—constructing a scene before exposure—became an important method in contemporary art. Puch’s sets retain unstable, visibly provisional constructions made from foam, paper, plants, and household objects. A CA2M collection catalog describes these scenes as laboratory-like environments and notes the presence of his interests in light, mathematics, science, and education throughout the work of the 1990s^*11.

Why Photography? Turning Temporary Sculpture into “Evidence”

In a 2002 interview with El País, Puch himself emphasized the manual construction of an actual scene before exposure over the production of illusion through digital manipulation^*5. Because the set physically existed in front of the camera, a fictional scene retains photography’s documentary trace that “this place existed.” Banco de España explains that this undermines ideas of the snapshot and photographic “truth,” producing what José Lebrero Stals calls “documento-ficción”^*2.

Photography for Doubt: Refusing a Settled Genre

In the same interview, Puch places his work in the realm of “doubt” rather than “certainty,” saying that what interests him is the movement toward a place he does not already know^*26. His wish to mix photography, video, drawing, collage, and photomontage without sorting them into separate categories—creating a “hybrid document” that crosses the boundaries of the photographic image and resists fixed definition—is another key to his form^*26. Staged photography becomes an experimental site in which physically made objects and events are fixed into images that retain an evidentiary charge. Drawings, scientific signs, actions, and everyday objects collide within scenes that do not fit easily into established photographic genres.

Homenaje a Vermeer: Light, Science, and a Disordered Classroom as One Experiment

Homenaje a Vermeer (1994) uses window light, maps, books, paper, and a laboratory-like interior to overlap the visual language of Vermeer’s studio scenes with that of scientific experiment. A Comunidad de Madrid catalog connects the work to Puch’s concentrated interest in light, painting, and science during the 1990s, describing how actual objects and inexplicable events coexist within the same scene^*12. The photograph contains both a reference to painting and spaces—classrooms and laboratories—where knowledge is supposed to be ordered, fixing a state in which scattered objects prevent meaning from settling.

UCLM also lists mathematics, science, music, biology, and environmental studies among his subjects. Diagrams and models recur as signs of his interest in the institutional processes that make knowledge visible^*4. The scenes do not provide a solution to a puzzle; they are structured so that relations become less stable as information accumulates.

Incidentes: Theater, Sculpture, and Domestic Space Compressed into the Instant of a Photograph

The CAAC solo exhibition Incidentes (2003–04) presented Puch’s method in concentrated form. The CAAC publication archive records the exhibition catalog as a standalone publication^*13. ABC Sevilla described the work of this period as a practice that questions photographic truth and constructs scenes as “documentos-ficciones,” reporting Puch’s comments on laboratories, art and science, and staging^*6.

The construction of the set itself carries the work’s thinking. Banco de España describes white architectural forms, household objects, and figures coexisting only during the shoot, producing a state difficult to classify as theater, performance, photography, or moving image^*1. The photograph ultimately compresses multiple temporalities and media onto a single surface, and that surface alone extends the life of the scene.

Le Corbusier con piña: Modernist Utopia Contaminated by Refrigerators and Fruit

In Le Corbusier con piña (2005), a white high-rise and model roads coexist with an open refrigerator, potted plants, and an enormous pineapple on a shelf. Banco de España’s exhibition text reads the image as a collision between the utopian ideals of Le Corbusier’s urban planning and the memory of perishable matter associated with Baroque still life^*3. As the pristine modernist model is invaded by the disorder of everyday life, the distance between the order of the plan and the space that is actually lived becomes visible.

Large-Scale Prints: Returning Constructed Objects to the Viewer as a Scene

Puch has presented his constructed “incidents” as large-scale color photographs. UCLM identifies large-format prints as a basic form of his work^*4. Museo Reina Sofía lists a 2004 Sin título as a 160 × 225 cm digital chromogenic print, indicating the physical scale at which the final image confronts the viewer^*10.

Around 2007, the exhibitions themselves became more explicitly installation-based. A CA2M catalog records how Puch retained photography as a principal support while incorporating moving image, with exhibitions after 2007 expanding into installation^*11. A 2007 review in El País likewise discusses the work as a practice in which photographs, lightboxes, and exhibition space extend beyond the frame^*7.

Science and Nature: Uncertain Landscapes in the Guise of Research

At PHotoEspaña 2006, Puch had a solo exhibition at the Real Jardín Botánico; Photography Now also records the exhibition in his history^*19. CAAC’s 2008 exhibition Untamed Paradises included Puch among artists addressing relations between science and nature and presented a project in which the artist’s studio became something like a “hospital” for plants^*17. The exhibition press material placed him in a section reconsidering relations between nature and knowledge through art’s borrowing of scientific methods and instruments^*18.

Puch’s “experiments” do not seek to reproduce scientific correctness. Measurement, models, classification, and the laboratory are shown as devices that simplify reality in order to make it intelligible, while chance, jokes, and everyday clutter enter those systems. The photograph fixes these unstable arrangements. It resembles a record of experimental results while refusing to settle what the results mean.

Una jornada sin nubes: Extending the Studio Experiment into the Environment

Writing on the 2011 CAB de Burgos exhibition Una jornada sin nubes (literally, “a day without clouds”), Sema D’Acosta notes that Puch moved away from his earlier theatrical tableaux vivants populated by figures and expanded toward unstable structures made from discarded materials, still lifes of cut vegetables, drawings, and installation. The continuing subject was the relation between humans and nature; his unease with scientific interpretation detaching nature from its surroundings turned toward environmental degradation and artificial landscapes^*27.

Puch’s “laboratory” is not fixed to a particular interior set. In the 1990s, scientific diagrams, models, and everyday objects collided indoors; by the 2010s, his field had expanded to waste materials, plants, and exhibition space. Moving among photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation, he repeatedly constructs situations in which the bond between knowledge and matter comes apart. The early method of composing a scene for the camera remains, but as the environment itself becomes a subject, space outside the photograph also becomes part of the work.

Physically Constructed Fiction Behind a Surreal Appearance

Puch’s images can appear surreal at first, but that appearance comes from physically constructed sets and actions. Los Claveles presents Buscando en la zona as a continuation of the “incidentes,” where installation, moving image, and laboratory logic intersect^*20. e-flux likewise featured him in an exhibition of artists who addressed psychological and social realities through constructed scenes^*21.

A consistent principle is that fiction is made physically in front of the camera rather than hidden inside invisible computer processing. His emphasis in El País on photography as handwork reveals the central paradox: he questions photographic truth while retaining physical contact with reality^*5. This physical construction produces photographs that are fictional and, at the same time, records of events that actually existed.

Spanish Photography After the 1990s: Between Photography and Installation

The artist’s official exhibition history includes solo shows at CAAC, PHotoEspaña, CAB de Burgos, and Julie Saul Gallery in New York, among others, documenting his reception in both photography-specific and contemporary-art venues^*8. His public collections include Reina Sofía, MUSAC, CAAC, the Blanton Museum, and Banco de España, among others^*9. The Junta de Andalucía also recorded the acquisition of his work by CAAC in an official 2004 document^*16.

Lessons from Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson: Scenes That Do Not Stand Still

The sense that Puch’s figures and objects have been caught in the middle of an action reflects theatrical influences as well as photographic precedents. He has said that seeing productions by Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson taught him to think of light, color, installation, performance, energy, and movement as inseparable, with the image continually “happening”^*26. He consequently came to feel that figures in a photograph did not need to stand still and pose; they could be in the middle of doing something^*26. The theatrical sensibility Puch drew from Bausch and Wilson allows his photographs to compress the duration of sculpture and action into a single frame. Photography is necessary because it stops the action, leaving enough within the arrested instant to suggest what came before and after without supplying an ending.

Puch’s place in photographic history lies in loosening the binary between photographing reality and making fiction. Building objects, positioning figures, and determining light before exposure are unmistakably acts of staging, yet the finished photograph also records the real existence of that staging. His constructed photography retains photography’s factual charge while making the fact itself something produced for the camera.

CAAC collection materials have continued to present Puch as an artist in the collection of contemporary Andalusian art^*14. A 2006 collection exhibition likewise presented his work in a context crossing photography and installation^*15.

Alongside Casebere and Demand: Returning the “Constructed Image” to Spanish Everyday Space

A 2005 exhibition of the Telefónica contemporary photography collection at MARCO was organized around a shift from photography as “document” toward “narrative/representation” at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, when artists increasingly worked consciously with the medium’s own codes. It included Puch and James Casebere in the same exhibition^*22. The exhibition traced this history through the Düsseldorf School, artists around John Baldessari, and the cinematic or pictorial photography of Jeff Wall, situating Puch at a moment when the distinction between “photographer” and “artist using photography” was becoming less rigid.

The connection to Casebere and Thomas Demand lies in a shared method of constructing the scene before exposure, not in a claim of direct influence. Guggenheim Bilbao places both within a history of the “constructed image,” in which models or full-scale environments are built in order to be photographed^*25. In Puch’s interiors, constructions, scientific diagrams, furniture, plants, and bodily traces are not concealed within a seamless stage set; the disorder of work in progress remains visible. CAAC calls this method “documento-ficción,” describing a practice that gives fiction the appearance of reality while favoring accumulation over classification^*24. For Puch, the trace of real objects, fabrication, knowledge, and play colliding within one frame matters more than the seamless perfection of an illusion.

New Uses of Photography in the Late 1990s: The Interior as a Device for Producing Fiction

Fundación Telefónica included Puch in Interiores, an exhibition of works made from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. It described a period in which fragments of interiors, streets, churches, and faces acquired new meanings through manipulation, fiction, and desire^*23. The cluttered studio in Incidentes does more than provide a backdrop for strange events. The interior temporarily connects sculpture, drawing, scientific signs, and everyday objects; photography alone fixes that connection onto a single surface that carries the appearance of fact.