JOSĆ MANUEL BALLESTER
JosƩ Manuel Ballester (Madrid, 1960), began his career painting canvases, with a special interest in the technique of the Italian and Flemish schools of the 15th and 18th centuries. Since 1990, he has focused on architectural photography.
The National Photography Prize was awarded to him by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 2010, the jury considering him worthy of the award “for his personal career, coming from the plastic arts and crystallized with rigor in the field of photography, for his unique interpretation of architectural space and light, and for his outstanding contribution to the renewal of photographic techniques”.
His exhibition, Una Mirada PoliĆ©drica, at the FundaciĆ³n Canaria para el Desarrollo de la Pintura (FCDP), is his first solo exhibition in the Canary Islands. In it, we can appreciate how his work is the result of the experience he has gained in the countless trips he has made throughout his artistic career.
The vision of other cultures, other societies and other ways of approaching existence, have allowed him to appreciate the diversity in a globalized world. Being able to value the importance of the local level and its transcendence to the universal. The selection of places so different from each other that he presents on this occasion, provides, on the one hand, a polyhedral vision of reality together with a uniformity that is progressively spreading through the territories he has visited. For this reason, JosƩ Manuel Ballester highlights the conflict involved in the assimilation of the new homogenizing models of our current society to the detriment of the cultural richness that the world, in its diversity, had offered us until now, bringing to the forefront the cultural richness that the world, in its diversity, had offered us until now, bringing to the forefront the cultural richness that the world, in its diversity, had offered us until now.