G  A  B  R  I  E  L    L  A  C  O  M  B  A  :    S  E  L  F  -  P  O  R  T  R  A  I  T

It's getting harder all the time to find that the particular kind of artists we once called experimemtal or avant-garde. As we step into the XXth century's last decade, cinema has dangerously standardized, heading for aesthetics determined by the luxury of commercials, expensive though scarcely imaginative adventure stories, and, in the end, the empire of television. It's getting harder all the time to find people like Gabriel Lacomba, who will do cinema, and whatever, for the sake of expression needs, but not of commercially conditioned scheme or easy opportunism. His SELF-PORTRAIT he did with-out considering the meanest chances it would have to reach as many people as BATMAN does. This work's great worth lies not in its intuitive discovery of language alone, but in the simple fact that it was done at all, considering -maybe he didn't and he just would not care- the severe condition personal, renewing art is in. SELF-PORTRAIT explores within the experience of life itself, within our innermost feelings, passions and fears, dissecting anything that brands and will forever brand us... and comes back to us as a very elaborate production, crammed with visual findings that are but the outcome of an exercise in upright honesty, with no concessions, on human nature. There's criticism and self-criticism, love, humour and pessimism in it. There's great deal of imagination/invention in it too -considering the modest equipment engaged- that speaks of an unmistakably promising artist. It is obvius that Lacomba's next works will be more expensive, more ambitious and, most probably, more perfect; but with his SELF-PORTRAIT he has made his point: that cinema in its purest state is still alive.

Manel Huerga
January 1990

G  I  V  I  N  G    T  I  M  E    T  I  M  E

We behold a few portraits which by some feigned hazard apper to possess the esential impossibility of being alive. In them, indeed, that contradiction which constitutes the very root of wonder springs to the eye. On one hand, what we poor mortals mean by alive and commonly connect with movement; and, on the other, that verb, to be, that we connect with stillness (as in some way only the dead really are). But in these portraits (O, miracle of the old technique!) we happen to be and then to be alive. Beatiful paradox which Gabriel proves and captures with his camera as he intends to objectivate a subject who is making an object of himself, on better still, a statue (*1), in a hard, slow duel aggainst Time. For through this rudimentary technique requiring lengthy minutes of impassive posing (giving Time time), in that opposing discontinuity, countenances in pure duration seem to be saying: See, nothing happened!; and for a moment such denial of velocity, such sudden stagnation of Time, allows us to unearth its sham clockworks, its ultimate nakedness, its utter idealness. And thus countenances lashed by his whip, tru "flagellum Dei", turn against him in a disturbing, endless regard, haloed by a throbbing aura, as Walter Benjamin would say. Let's be thankful then for Gabriel's express relinquishment to fall for Hi-tech when Hi-tech rules the market for both the audio-visual and our lives (which become more and more audio-visual all the time!). Thank him for that restraint, that lively resistance to the squandering of a-thousand-stances-a-minute; for aiming a single, slow, accurate shot at the heart of Time. For retrieving those old gimmicks and long ago techniques which by rare chances (perhaps due mainly to their own imperfection) attain better than that natural spontaneity of modern photography to approach the impossible mistery of our lives' time.

(*1) "estatua" (statue) has in spanish the same root as "estar" (to be).

Isabel Escudero - Miguel Ángel Velasco
December 1989