The photographs on this page were exhibited in Colección Engelman-Ost, Rondeau, Montevideo, in August and September, 2002.  They were selected from a series of photographs taken in Uruguay (Rocha and Tacuarembó), Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul) and Argentina (Rio Negro).

The photographs were taken with an Olympus OM4Ti camera and Olympus lenses using Kodachrome Professional film.

Exhibition Text    

Natural Drawing

The interest in landscape and its portrayal has been investigated for centuries in all disciplines of art. Photography, beyond its role of capturing a precise moment of an object or a situation, is redefined as a conscious means, as a vision of man and nature, of man and his culture.

Sean Partridge has a very close bond with the natural landscape, which, thanks to his love of mountain climbing and trekking, he has captured with his lens since the 1960’s.

As a child, Partridge went fishing with his father and observed reflections and trees in the landscape. He made a record in his memory, an index where he stored these images. As an adult, he decided to try and recapture these images.

This particular communion with his memories of the landscape and his perceptions took him through different paths in photography, until he finally decided to decontextualise the landscape and to frame it to show a more psychological perception of nature. A lake, a sky or a rock, a profile of the object, or his own reflection in front of that object.

The close-up is a means to capture the essence of a fragment, to singularize the sensation that the act of enjoying nature brings, and to transmit it. Photography is not a mirror anymore; it is an entity, condemned to supplant memory, a mirror of memory, a certificate of attendance to the setting. Emotions are not constructed and neither are these photographs. They are just close-ups, an “anatomical zoom” quoting Baudrillard, that settles and redefines itself, the seduction of nature and other possible interpretations.

In Lanin, Argentina, Sean Partridge found a puddle covered by a singular layer of oil, characteristic of that geography, which reflected the trees: an upside-down sky. A metaphor about the mirror, photography and the perceiving eye. A possible interpretation guides us to the technique by which grease is applied to the negative, in the process of copying, to obtain the effect of a melting image. Finally Partridge, avoiding effects, achieves the same result from nature itself, determined to find his resources in the original, in the puddle covered by the layer of oil.

In many European forests, trees are chopped down before they complete their life cycle and they are replaced in order to continue producing wood. It is a cut-off cycle turned into a big industry. In these latitudes dead trees and their bark make it possible for other plants such as lichens and fungus to live on them. The larvae of certain beetles also feed on these trees and bark, and they produce a real natural drawing in the widest sense of the word. As they complete their cycle, the insects fly to other dead trees to lay their eggs and a new cycle of carvings begins. Sean Partridge rescues these cycles rigorously and in their real time. He makes a metaphor of the artist’s endless need to record his being, a moment of his presence.

Nature and its cycles are used as parallel entities. Nature – life – death – posterity – the restart of the cycle – memory and finally in this case, the photographs and the exhibition hall that bind this concept in the art field, paraphrasing the strategies of creation in art. The landscape shows its potential in the sunlight. This unique vision, one of sharing sensations and emotions from nature, is the focus of these series of photographs. Waiting for the exact moment when the light allows the selection of a frame, in full consciousness.

The sun reflects on a stream near Tacuarembó, and Sean Partridge records these beams of light. The result looks like a scratched negative, a technique used by many photographers and movie makers on their sensitive films. However, Sean Partridge plays from a different perspective here. Using only the resources he finds in the natural object itself, he gives us a glimpse of how nature impairs culture. “Reality overthrows fantasy” is a well-known saying, but in this case the author does not use any special effect or trick; he shows us what he finds: it is a close-up to a post-industrial technique that already exists in nature and that culture tries to imitate. The matte paper helps to bring out the real colours of the landscape and to avoid the false gloss of photographs.

Sean Partridge’s manifesto intends to guide us towards the layers hidden under reality, to decontaminate the view and to lead us back to the origins: textures, light, drawings, marks. He does not intend to produce pictorial photography. On the contrary, he shows us that the evolution of painting (if there is one), no matter how abstract or far from reality it may seem, is a disjointed record of a stored look, a fragment of the memory of the landscape.

FERNANDO LÓPEZ LAGE (b.1964)

Montevideo, Uruguay.

Fernando López Lage is an artist, educationalist

and curator of contemporary art.

Exhibition Leaflet