A Closer Look At España Oculta

Viewing Christina García Rodero’s España Oculta (Hidden Spain), at Sala Picasso, Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the exhibition was busy and noisy with people. It was as if something of the life and animation shown in many of her pictures had rubbed off on its viewers, continuing through their chatter and laughter.  Pictures do not always generate such chatter and the noisy crowds at this show certainly marked a refreshing change from the usual polite silence with which art is met. 

García Rodero’s black and white pictures of carnivals, festivals and religious rituals in Spain during a period spanning from a year before Franco’s death in 1975, up until 1989, are all to a degree pictures of extraordinary and expressive moments.  On one hand a realm of ritual, faith and devotion and on the other the more comedic and slapstick elements of carnival, clowning around and play.

Her pictures look at carnivals and processions askance. Contingent and ordinary details interrupt the formality of religious ceremonies and occasions.  One photograph, for example, shows an elderly woman in plain dress looking at her watch while hooded penitents gather behind her. Is she their timekeeper or is she simply bored and distracted?  There is the detail of a hooded penitent playfully holding the snout of a dog, and the picture showing a waiter cutting between the order of a more ornately costumed Holy Week procession, as he carries on with his job and its routine. Such small disruptions bring in an everyday real in relation to the more lofty realm of the ritualistic and symbolic. Interest in the disruptive presence of the waiter is clearly a counterpoint to and break from the Catholic procession itself and all it might mean in a Spain recovering from Franco’s regime. The Catholic Church had supported Franco’s coup and in many senses legitimised his dictatorship.

In a somewhat comic scene of oppositions and mirrorings, a man in an elaborate fancy carnival costume, a Peliqueiros, stands in the doorway of a café, while to his left, his counterpart remains standing indoors looking out at us, his face and ordinary clothes visible through the glass of the closed wooden doors’ windows. The picture sets up a dynamic and amusing contrast between the idea of the two men, one extrovert and the other introvert. The pairing of the masked and costumed man with his ordinary companion also makes us think of the dynamic running through many of García Rodero’s photographs, with her interest in combining the carnival with moments of the more day-to-day and ordinary.  

In one carnival scene, a man pisses shamelessly and joyously right before the camera, his urine beautifully catching the light.  Such a picture is a reminder of the dynamics at play, that the female photographer is not invisible and the laughing man’s daft display and performance before camera is done for her. It is a moment of release, a blunt counterpoint to her pictures of the devout, worshippers bent over in prayer or on their knees, one in pouring rain, another in hope that her ill child will recover.

In another, during a holy parade, the vivid figural presence of Christ’s body on a cross looms large over the celebratory moment in which a mother holds her young daughter who is standing on her shoulders and kissing a small crucifix held aloft by an older woman. Children figure in many pictures, but more often captured at moments of play and disruption during the parades and carnivals. In a place where people perform the Passion, she pictures the moment when the crucifixion scene has been taken over by children who have climbed on the crosses and hang there, some with their legs spread out.

Against her photography of rituals and carnivals, her picture of a priest and his mother, over a meal with bread and wine, offers a quieter observed moment, a concentration on a small gesture and what it may mean. They are shown seated at the end of a wooden table, out of doors. As a familial scene, it is cold and bare. The priest is pictured just as he puts his hand to his face and his eyes are closed — a state of inner reflection or sign of pain and suffering or even guilt?  Under Franco, priests were often complicit with his regime, a mouthpiece for the state’s ideology, carrying its propaganda to their congregations. 

As part of the San Juan festival in Ciutadella, riders get horses to prance on their hind legs through its streets.  García Rodero’s photograph of this event shows us both the splendor and beauty of a horse reared up with its front hooves in the air, and the tension between this animal and its rider as they strain to maintain the performance and the people crowding close, dangerously close in some instances, all around. By giving us a sense of the physicality and conflicting energies and forces of this event, it goes beyond spectacle. As do her pictures of bullfights, as we shift between bull leaping and people running from bulls to the violent aftermath of this tradition: two young children witnessing from a small distance a woman hosing away the blood coming from a dead bull.   

In one beautiful tableau-like scene, a teenage girl, her head on a bundle of hay, sleeps on a wooden pallet in the foreground, while behind her a man and woman (her parents?) are bent over as they thresh corn. It is an end-of-day scene, an elegy to a pre-mechanical agrarian past. The girl’s bruised and dirty legs and feet index the physical toil that has exhausted her, temper the idyll. 

The picture comes towards the end of the show and links with a group in which death and the funerary become the main focus. The girl in the field’s resting body echoes that of the wax figure of a teenage girl in a picture of the shrine of Santa Minia, the holy remains of a girl preserved from Roman times and displayed in an ornate glass case in a chapel in the Galician village of Brión, a martyred saint worshipped for her powers of healing. García Rodero has pictured the saint just as a young boy looks at her from the other side of the case, his eyes sparkling unnaturally as they reflect the light of the flash. The power of this picture rests on the dynamic and tension between the two: the uncanny lifelikeness of the waxen effigy of the girl saint with closed eyes and the face of the boy with bright, reflective eyes, that make him seem unreal. 

In a photograph taken close to the side of an open coffin, a pallbearer’s face seen in profile echoes that of the man in the coffin. It sets up a relation — they could be brothers, one face stilled doubly by death and photography, the other’s face just stilled by the camera. The eyes of the person in the coffin are open and his clothes are casual not formal.  García Rodero has also photographed the rituals in which people having had a brush with death give thanks to Santa Marta by being carried in open coffins.  A degree of doubt as to the certainty of what we are seeing in this picture creeps in.

In a haunting photograph, taken at the side of a lane, a man and two older women stand by a small open coffin with a child inside. One of the women is in mourning, wearing a black dress, while the other carries the coffin lid in her arm and quizzically looks back at the photographer. One assumes that this picture must have been taken during the festival for those who give thanks to those whose life has been spared and that the child is alive not dead. The ritual around the coffin and child is disrupted by the detail of a boy on his racing bike behind them; oblivious, he races on. What might be seen to spoil the picture makes the picture, and fits with García Rodero’s tendency to look at the world awry, allowing for a formal moment and occasion to unravel a little.  In contrast, her photograph of a young boy, jacket zipped up and hands in pockets, sitting confined behind a closed rather ornate coffin and staring directly at the camera, is much more formal and direct. There does not seem to be any release from the confrontation set up and the painful sense of the weight and impact of an adult’s death on a child.

The historical period in which García Rodero was taking these pictures meant that she was picturing a side of Spain before the full impact of consumer tourism upon it. One picture does however hint at what is to come. In Amateur, 1981, a man adorned in a floral-patterned costume stands before the wall of the dead.  He holds a movie camera to one eye and appears to be filming what is taking place in front of him and beyond what can be shown us in the photograph. While the floral tributes to the dead behind him link with the flower patterns visible on his outfit, his costume is still somewhat out of place in the cemetery and a contrast to the mourning black dress of an older woman, standing in profile to the side of him.  She stands with her hands held together and looking straight ahead to something that is also out of the photograph’s frame. The two figures are looking in different directions. Nothing connects them. They seem to occupy two separate worlds and show us two distinct modes of seeing, her seeming more reverent gaze in contrast to his touristic looking.  His, a mode of looking that cues the present relation to Spain’s customs and traditions as they are consumed through photography, and a reminder of how different Rodero’s art is from all this, with her interest remaining more with the people than the spectacle so many are part of. 

Cristina García Rodero’s “España Oculta” was at Sala Picasso, Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid from May to August 2024. 

More on this: 

Hidden Spain: An Interview with Cristina Garcia Rodero