Montserrat Soto

After completing her studies in Contemporary Image Procedures at the Massana School in Barcelona in 1989, Montserrat Soto has carried out a good number of artistic projects in which she has combined photography (her most well-known work nationally and internationally) with video installations and Internet projects.

Montserrat Soto conceives the photographic image as a code capable of confronting the viewer with a specular reality that must be traversed to enter new spaces, also mental ones. Thus, over the years and throughout various projects, the dialectic inside/outside has been subtly and effectively deconstructed, dismantled and reconstructed. In this sense, the architecture of interior spaces—for example, hallways, unavoidable places of transit, as well as architectural elements such as windows and doors (precisely the means of interrelation between exterior and interior)—has played a leading role in her trajectory.

Complementarily, her most recent projects have developed in open spaces: on one of the Canary Islands, Gomera, and in the vast greenhouse areas of the province of Almería.

The work Untitled. Container Fence is earlier and holds an intermediate position between human construction and landscape. With great economy of means, but with an exquisite degree of refinement in the treatment of the image, Montserrat Soto presents us with a horizon line (paradigm of landscape) of brutal presence—made with disused barrels that ruthlessly separates the sky from the earth (both reduced to two almost monochromatic bands, empty to the point of nakedness).

Text provided by the Mediterranean Foundation. Author: J. B. Peiró.