Gabriel Cualladó

Photography has been an interest in the IVAM collection ever since its first acquisitions in 1986, and we have also tried to integrate the medium naturally into our exhibition programme. Gabriél Cualladó (Massanassa, 1925 – Madrid, 2003) was one of the photographers who best combined the photographer’s personal gaze with the spontaneity of the medium itself. Cuallado claimed to be an “amateur”; perhaps because he had no need to make a profession out of his work, over the years he built up a body of strongly empathetic, sincere work. The people around him, family and friends, and later on, a collective portrait of his profession, colleagues and symbolic places from his childhood, complete his oeuvre, in which a quiet way of being predominates.

This was the first exhibition to be dedicated to Cualladó, and presented a series of photographs made from 1955–1989, together with the photo-essays París (Paris, 1962), La Cervecería Alemana (German Beer, late 60s), La Real Sociedad Fotográfica (1979, 1982), El Rastro de Madrid (The Madrid Rastro, 1980–1981), and La Albufera (1985). The images selected bring together those that particularly interested the artist, even at the expense of some of his best-known works. To the scenes or intimate portraits of familiar people and places, Cualladó added a number of series in which the emphasis continues to be on his subjects’ closeness, expressing the simple, sincere gestures of anonymous people and places he was visiting for the first time. Gabriel Cualladó’s ability to look long and closely was a previous, necessary stage to another of his skills – choosing what to photograph.

Almost a year after this exhibition, in the group project Els paisatges de Joanot Martorell. Gandia i La Safor (The Landscapes of Joanot Martorell. Gandía and La Safor), also exhibited at the IVAM, Cualladó once again showed that the empathy of the photographer is a strange, infrequent synthetic capacity that conjoins knowing how to look with letting things happen.