Untitled, "Secret life" series" (3 of 3)

Since the beginning of his photographic career, in the early 1970s, Carlos Cánovas has been articulating his work around a few subjects: walls, plants inserted in urban spaces and the peripheral territory where the city becomes diluted. Precision and recurrence in his plastic treatment have finally configured an extensive mapping of margins and limits that concludes in a very personal analysis of urban conditions.
His work with plants, of which the Vida secreta (Secret life) series (2000-2011) is the last episode, can be understood as a complementary reflection. Enclosed indoors and limited to a very small land area where they can settle their roots, these plants become 'suffering' metaphors of uprooting underlining the idea of loneliness.
On the other hand, urban landscapes seem to be in a permanent process of change, like an intermediate space that degrades in disorder or simply dissolves slowly to give way to a field of imprecise vacant lots, weeds, meadows or even crop fields which are not yet properly what we understand as nature. Once these landscapes are registered as images in the strategy of the photographer, they show the importance of the limit and reveal the poetic qualities of a border area —Paisaje anónimo (Anonymous landscape), 1994-2007. Time becomes duration, remains somehow suspended, floating, to emphasize that nothing is happening and that no event is expected later, no matter how banal it may be. The apparently trivial builds up like this, from the most complete abandonment, a poetics of the provisional and a space of fragile sceneries.
Santiago B. Olmo