Imaginative and intuitive, Biel Capllonch is quite reluctant when asked to provide specific answers about his leitmotif. “Justifying my pictures through continuous conceptualizations in order to find a place in the art market is not my thing”, he emphasizes. In contrast with the majority of his colleagues, who pursue a career in fine art photography, Capllonch still preserves the mentality of an unconventional loner who finds it much more challenging dealing with the ups and downs of commercial assignments than frequenting gallery venues.
Born in Mallorca in 1964 and currently based in Barcelona, Capllonch obtained a Fine Arts Degree before dedicating his crafts to advertising and fashion photography. Needless to say, practice attracted him more than theory. Since then, he has produced some of the most successful campaigns for brands and magazines both in his native country and abroad, alongside a great amount of personal work for art shows.
Whether commercial or personal, the highly complex universe that Capllonch recreates with his camera has little to do with a down-to-earth reality. Covering distinct genres and registers, from luxurious domestic and urban-like landscapes to fashionable tableau vivants, his theatrically orchestrated sets reconstruct a hermetic world imbued with the aura of a restrained eroticism.
Yet, there is a very disquieting effect in this apparently perfect reality of luxurious nightlife sensuality. As if they were derivatives of artificial cloning, Capllonch´s models delve, by means of a subtle digital treatment, into a plastic expressiveness deprived of any dramatic tension. Women in glamorous dresses and men in caramelized bodies appear floating in a suspended material high-class world, where limits between truth and falsehood become blurred.
These bodies become for Capllonch the field, where all ambivalent configurations take place. His pictures deconstruct the way we perceive masculinity and femininity, leading to a new “who is who” iconography. Viewed within a traditional system of representations, women gain a fixed role in the composition as alluring beauty beasts. Contrarily to them, men are not clearly defined as such. Charged with fragility and with an hybrid homoerotic sexuality, they work as destabilizing elements, calling for genre and identity transgression.
Natasha Christia: Your concern with hybrid identities and duality tricks resonates to a project that marked your commercial breakthrough in Spain. I am referring to the official marketing promotion created for the Sonar Festival of Electronic Music and Multimedia in 2000. In an intriguing game of unresolved mystery, the series displayed two couples of twin women with paranormal powers in postures of self-recognition, establishing mysticism and genre perplexity as the core of your oeuvre to come. How did your “play” with the morphology of the body start?
Biel Capllonch: When we did the Sonar campaign with Sergio Caballero, I was engaged with very similar issues regarding the duality of images and the attitude of the body towards its environment. I was taking photos of inhabited spaces in the absence of people. My aim was to touch upon the notion of absence as abandonment or as presence of no-people. In the meantime, I was also doing a series of nude figures in levitation. Thanks to this, I connected directly with the paranormal element that formed the base of the whole campaign. It was a happy coincidence and a project with an excellent script and mise en scene.
NC: The hermetic fictionalized character of your universe finds its parallel in the invisible fissures seen in Jeff Wall´s work. How much do you acknowledge Jeff´s influence on your pictures?
BC: When Jeff Wall was shooting “Morning Cleaning” at the Pabellon Mies Van de Rohe in Barcelona I was asked to become his assistant. I was, in some way, familiar with his work through books, but just the basics. I took the job of course. In the twenty days we worked together, we talked less about photography and more about banal stuff such as tortilla, siesta or even the American Methodists. I guess that, rather than from him, I have drawn my fascination with this “normal abnormality” from others, in their majority, filmmakers. I also learnt to appreciate it at the moment of staging a scene, project it on camera and make it work…
NC: Mentioning film, the atmosphere of sophisticated mystery and darkness in your images carries with it a film noir aura, but it completely lacks irony and obvious humour. Why?
BC: Even if the whole creative process is charged with irony and sarcasm because it simply amuses me to do so, I do not like to see this reflected in the resulting image. I am not fond of pictures that make opposing statements to what they supposedly have to say. I prefer it much better when not everything is fully expressed. Therefore, the scenes I stage are closer to ellipsis and metaphor than to deliberate irony. However, my work is in no way linked with film noir. Mystery in my photos is created by not revealing all that I know about an image. You can find parallels with my practice in movies, such as “The Exterminating Angel” by Buñuel or “Lost Highway” by David Lynch. These films are a mystery per se, without resolving anything. Their structure does not correspond to any established film noir narratives. What they do is appropriate intrigue, mystery and enigma you can find in a film noir film, blending it with a strange perversity that fascinates me. In a very similar way, I avoid creating a meaningless visual space in terms of the real world. I opt, instead, for a credible abnormality, in which aberrations have to be more subtle through the maintenance of the equilibrium between the representation of reality and the use of poetic means.
NC: Apart from mystery, there is another important representational parameter in your work: the contrast of femininity and masculinity. Women carry the well-known femme fatal aura while in the case of men you opt for a rather alternative representation of a hybrid masculinity distanced from the prototype of the straight macho. In most cases, men are displayed as grown children of an undefined sexuality. In their boxer shorts, their bodies transmit a plastic naivety. What is the reason for this obsession of yours with underwear?
BC: The way I wish to represent masculinity and femininity is not so obvious even for me. Perhaps things are more evident with the female body, since it is situated on a more distinct representational level than masculinity. Call it Venus, Luna, Maria or whatever, it is closer to traditional culture and to human logic, so it becomes easier for me to mould it. On the other hand, I loose myself when it comes to masculinity. In any case, my representation of men goes far away from heroes or myths. This is why my men are an accumulation of innocence, anti-macho posture, certain disorientation and basic sexuality. The decency of nudity is highly important to me, since it forms part of a more devoid representation of masculinity. Whoever strips oneself completely has things clearer, but my subjects do not. There is always a sort of disconnection and a lack of communication among my characters that delves into a natural tension between a confined desire and a crude reality. It is impossible for me to show things in a different way.
NC: How easy is to adjust this very personal vision of yours to commercial assignments for fashion or advertising photography?
BC: I struggle so that my ideas do not fall within the established patrons of these fields. Sometimes I find solutions to my projects by crossing over to the opposite field. Transgression is part of a photographer´s job. In fashion, there is a sort of frontier you cannot cross. There are some rules. Everything has to be surrounded by finery and styling as if ugliness did not exist. In order to overcome this aestheticism, I opted, in some cases, for a certain photographic pictorialism grounded in iconography from the history of art since it renders pictures much easier to assimilate. In other cases, I employ deliberately aesthetic and theatrical scenery, with not so satisfactory personal results, to be honest. This is why, in general terms, I prefer to work with a mise en scene on the basis of what you encounter in situ than with a setting. Advertising is different. The entire framework asks for less sophisticated connotations, leaving beauty to one side and focusing more on message and concept. Even so, the final result of an advertising assignment depends on the collaboration between the photographer and his creative team. With a little help, sometimes the final result works as a mixture of fine art and propaganda with a great dose of subversion, and this is what makes the product unique.
NC: How does it feel working in Spain and abroad?
BC: If the script does not ask for it, I don´t need to take photos of Eskimos in a redwood forest. Working in Barcelona for international assignments is perfect. Even if, according to William Bowles, “Spain is full of monkeys and Catholics”, all these in a clever combination can bring spectacular results. As far as Spanish media assignments are concerned, things are quite different. You have to be moral, positive, aesthetic, in most cases, with no content. Everything has to be good, nice and cheap. Unfortunately, that is the law.
NC: Have you ever drawn inspiration for a project from a dream?
BC: When I wake up I never remember what I dreamt. And if I do, my dreams are concerned with everyday things, like having a picnic or doing cross stitch. A dreamlike image never comes out of the memory of a dream. I have never fully understood all this insistence by the Surrealists on physical dreams. I only create on the basis of what I consciously think or imagine.
NC: If dreams are not the sources of inspiration, do you encounter it in the work of other artists?
BC: Listing a number of names might help grasp what has served to me as a reference for a specific project, but it would certainly not highlight what has influenced my vision as a whole. There are two small books of Jan Kaplicky that illustrate very well what can be understood as inspiration today (“creativity is everywhere”). I collect a handful of images with which I feel identified. My decision is determined by a trivial detail, such as the color of a dress. Let´s say that I have a primitive taste for artworks by Buñuel, Picabia, Platt-Lynes, Delvaux, George Lucas, Adolf Loos, Antonioni, Lynch, John Holmes, Goya, or Ludwig Van Beethoven ...
NC: Which words would you use to describe your universe as an epilogue to this interview?
BC: There are three things in life: health, money and love. Whoever owns all three has to thank God, because if God fails, everything becomes bad, ugly and expensive…
©All pictures: Biel Capplonch
Represented by: DORA JOKER, Barcelona
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
Published in Eyemazing Issue 04/2007
