El Porque de las Naranjas

At first sight, reality appears chaotic and anarchic. If events have any kind of logic to them, it lies well hidden behind an overlay of banality so thick as to make it invisible. And yet, at certain exceptional moments, life slackens and reveals itself. The automaton allows its innards be glimpsed, and its mechanism becomes momentarily evident as the logic of chaos. In his new work, El porqué de la naranjas, Spanish photographer Ricardo Cases does not document the surface symptoms of reality, but instead renders the non-visible, the mechanistic. In his immediate surroundings – the fertile region of Levante in Spain – the photographer reveals ephemeral moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. Out on the streets he sets out to make visible the laws that regulate the universe, hunting down the elementary participles in the same vein as a nuclear physicist attempting to identify the Higgs particle. Cases uses the landscape as a laboratory, a place where these mechanisms can manifest themselves freely. The work is not a portrait of Levante itself, but of the spirit of Levante, and thus of the spirit of Spain as a whole. Luis Lopez Navarro