MONDO GALERIA presents “Forgotten Dreams,” Paco and Manolo’s first exhibition in Madrid.

The exhibition presents a collection of Polaroid’s accompanied by a careful selection of work from previous projects, as chosen by the curator. The exhibition is a tour of the collaboration between this duo of cult photographers, who have joined with Impossible Project for their final enterprise.

“Paco and Manolo” are Manolo and Paco, photographers from Barcelona, a pair whose photographs have been highly valued now for 15 years. They have photographed some of the most important figures in the world of music, art and culture. In many cases, their subjects are naked.

They make exquisite use of light and create impeccable, delicate and intimate staging.

It is possible that you know them by their magazine Kink or the monograph from the 10 years of Primavera Sound that was published in 2011. Both are enjoyable to the senses.

“Forgotten Dreams”

Last year we saw a documentary by Werner Herzog, “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” about the cave of Chauvet, where they found paintings that date back more than 30,000 years. At a time when everything, including art, has an expiration date, that feeling of frozen eternity fascinated us.

We have been taking photographs together for more than 15 years, and in that time we have already experienced some changes that have transcended our way or working, and even looking. We have moved from the traditional reel to the digital camera, and we are prepared for and open to what may come. But since the modern-day photograph is measured in pixels, you are aware of a lack of eternity that you also get in the paintings of Chauvet cave. With the digital format it gives us the impression that at any moment we could suffer a strange magnetic storm that destroys all the work of the last 9 years.

And that sense of transience is also working with Polaroid: how long will our images last in time? In many years time, many more than any of us can think, could somebody could find a hidden box and rediscover our polaroid’s?

Without having spent a thousand years, these last months we have opened our own cave of Chauvet. We have been rediscovering polaroid photography, thanks to photographic archeology of the Impossible Project. We have opened the cave and we are coming back to enjoy. And it is polaroids that we have always liked, ever since one of us gave the other a polaroid camera on the day of his communion.

This first camera has since disappeared, and although we have tried to find it in our parent’s house we have had no luck finding it. In the 90s, together, one gave the other a 636 Close Up camera for his birthday, and this camera accompanied us for a long time. Until, for many reasons, we stopped working with it. And we thought we would not use this camera again, until we discovered the Impossible Project.

The first Impossible photos were made in Athens. We despair. We did not know how to use them; we were stained, sometimes very dark and sometimes very clear… Until on the second reel, already in Barcelona, we began to get to the point. That play with the unforeseen was made necessary. When a photo was correct we were disappointed. The chemicals in the films have improved, and we are getting more and more hooked, to the point that we always carry a Polaroid camera with us.

The result of all these months of work, plus some incursions into the first Polaroid images of our old camera, is what we will be able to see in the exhibition “Forgotten Dreams.” Now, in addition to the 636 Close Up, we used an Automatic 230 that Francesca left us, a Polaroid Impulse that gave us the Lolo and Spectra System that we bought at the Rastro in Madrid.

That is the good thing about working with Impossible. As if they were the cave of Herzog, there are 300 million cameras waiting to be rediscovered.

Paco y Manolo, 2012