I Photographed Dry Spanish Farmlands That Resemble The Paintings Of Picasso, Miró, And Dalí

The series 'Sur/Real Lands' I made during the last couple of days of 2018 in the aridest regions of Spain.

I traversed the hill filled countryside near Zaragoza and Toledo, where, along the backs of the mountains, dried out streams had become farmland. Not only were these parcels easy to reach, but the soil’s moisture and fertility produced by the stream’s deposits helped farmers in the dry summer season. That is why in the picture we see there are exclusively two crops: olive plantations, which can bear the great heat, and wheat, which is harvested at the start of summer before the drought sets in.

Surely, the local farmers are not aware of what abstract formations their work has formed since they are only visible from the sky. After long hours of research and looking at satellite maps I was able to choose the most interesting sites. Later, on location, I photographed them in the best possible light.

The completed pieces are actually specially produced aerial photos that appear to be abstract paintings. They are landscapes with no horizon. The aerial perspective flattens the topography onto a plane, thus reinterpreting the landscape. Hills become patches and the slopes in between become lines, drawing map-like traces along the surface, which seems like a painter’s canvas. Time and space are suspended, and it is up to the beholder to decide what they are seeing – one-million-year-old geology, surrealism from the early twentieth century, mankind’s everyday struggle, or a prediction of future droughts.

The creative process takes these photographic compositions in the direction of turn-of-the-century Cubism, Surrealism, or Abstract Expressionism. Strong pareidolic forms in some of the pictures recall the work of Picasso, Miró, and Dali. Other works have no focal point like Vasarely’s art, reminiscent of patchwork. Or we see endless, frame-defying patterns in the vein of Simon Hantai, the famous inventor of the Pliage technique.

If this is truly how nature is, then could it be that we do not create art, we just already live in a realm of art that we have simply not noticed?

My works are awarded the Grand Prize at the 37th Hungarian Press Photo Competition and Award of Excellence at the 76th POYI (Pictures of the Year International) in USA are visual oscillations between the realistic documentation of a dried-out environment and the extravagance of painting.

The art pieces displayed at the Faur Gallery are actually composite pictures made up of multiple aerial photos. The largest ones contain as many as 100 megapixels. The unbelievably high resolution makes it possible to blow them up to human scale (1.5 meters or nearly 5 feet), so they may take their rightful place alongside paintings on gallery walls.

The 'Sur/Real Lands' series is one part of the Water.Shapes.Earth project. It is a chapter that uses aesthetic means to present and to document faithfully the scale of Humanity’s struggle when faced with a water shortage, as well as to demonstrate the water crisis that is now at Europe’s doorstep.

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