The movida, revisited
Pablo Pérez-Mínguez, or P.P.M., as he liked to sign himself, was one of the great portraitists of the creative and hedonistic movement that shook the Spanish eighties. He was the great glosador of the explosion of young, liberated artists who gave life to what came to be known as the Movida madrileña, the symbol par excellence that from then on catapulted the Spanish capital into the imagination of the whole planet.
The Art Centre of Alcobendas is exhibiting until 29 July a wide range of those portraits, whose essence consisted of "not just capturing the look or the glamour, but delving into the psychology of each character with improvised scenes". As P.P.M. himself defined it: "Instant theatre", "photo happenings", "illustrated chochonism".
José Tono, curator of the exhibition, recalls that P.P.M., as a regular visitor to the Museo del Prado, admired and evoked in his portraits the forcefulness of the scenes, the play of light and the verticality of the great Baroque portraitists. For Pablo, to photograph was to participate in a ceremony of possession articulated around a "hypnotic power" that allowed him to produce the portrait. Pablo enjoyed this "fantastic power of fascination" with which he laid bare the souls of those who came within range of his lens.
Pablo Pérez-Mínguez (1946-2012) began in the magazine Nueva Lente revolutionising the world of Spanish photography. The man who, in the language of the Movida, asked his intimates if there were any hot models to take their pictures, he was keen to convince Alaska y los Pegamoides, Radio Futura, an incipient Pedro Almodóvar, until he reached his famous Foto-Poro, where he managed to bring together the whole of La Movida.
P.P.M. explained his work as the art above all of Seeing and Living. Seeing everything around him. To feel the light and the shadows, the brightness, the space and the time. To live among all these things, to recognise them, to interpret them, to hate them or to love them. And after seeing, feeling, living, recognising, loving or hating, one can then, if one wishes, act, as freely as one knows how and as much as one can.
And the technique? "Well, the technique works in between all this. It's the easiest thing to do", he responded to those who prioritised manufacture over the strength of feeling. He infected La Movida or it inspired him that photography can show you the most beautiful side of things. Because for him "it is more important to take beauty out of things and life than its bitter side". And those who shared so many days, and above all so many nights, of that vitalist explosion, never tired of hearing him say that "being a pessimist is very simple; the real challenge is to be an optimist". This was, after all, what he conveyed in that house of all, his own home, at 14 Monte Esquinza Street, that "Spanish Factory" where the street people who aspired to a place in that cheerful firmament, confident that the future belonged to them, came to. Like Richard Avedon in the sixties in the United States, but adding his own central concept of "atmosphere in the image", P.P.M. proposes a mirror in which Los Modernos de la España del Cambio shine.
Many of his thoughts are also included in the exhibition, where the columns of the Art Centre of Alcobendas have been covered with his notes, captions and the many greguerías and aphorisms taken from his notebooks, after all, living testimony to the explosion of vitality that has characterised Madrid, ours and everyone's since then.