His double gaze, directed at both images and catastrophes, Paul Virilio found a sinister equivalence. Clearly, the French thinker knew the origins of each were different, but what was indistinguishable for him were the effects of these removals - human or “natural”-, the devastating equality of their results, the amorality of their consequences.



All of this integrates in his “Aesthetic of Disappearance”.

Jon Lanbroa’s photographs are located on the flip side of that idea. It is not about diversity in the causes and a subsequent unification in their derivations. On the contrary, it is about an initial unity which later gives room for unalike corollaries. Thus, these pieces of art try “to unveil” more than “reveal”: they remove a veil to expose the world’s details.

Koudelka and the design, Sugimoto and Tillmans, Salas and Madoz, as well as their travels and the humans with whom they coincide, compose a wide variety of influences that never pretend to become “distresses”.

Landscapes? Yes, but… Why talk about landscape when we can say “space”? Eras? Also, but… Why talk about era when we can evoke time itself? Globals, certainly, but who cares about the global when one can encode the universe?

Having said this, the city, a millennium, nature, any existence, is no more than an avatar in these appearances, whicare able to capture, at the same time, the immensity and fugacity of life, its strength and fragility, all we know about it and all the strangeness that it offers us.

Jon Lanbroa’s sequences do not kidnap our gaze but they kidnap us ourselves. In that remorseless shattering of boundaries, prejudices (previous judgements), identities, eras… A girl with some popcorn and a lagoon, a tree and a wisp remove us from our confined notion of the world and place us in a belonging, which however, does not endorse any property.​

These photographs contain the fragments of our liberty, with neither name nor date. With no expiry.