CARLOS LEAL Fearlesss

Text:
Elisa Bernard

From June onwards, the gallery will be exhibiting the work of Spanish-Swiss photographer Carlos Leal, who has made the street his favourite subject.
The photographs of this artist question the status of poor people in the city of Los Angeles. They show the places of obscurity where live the marginalized, the homeless, all those excluded from the market to prosperity, who are both inside and outside of society. Those who are forgotten, or rather ignored, but who are nevertheless very visible.

The title of the exhibition, Fearless, is itself representative of this decay of a country that prides itself on being the world's leading power but is, in reality, terribly afraid of itself. The story behind the image that gave the exhibition its name is symptomatic of this. The smoke in the sky is that created by a homeless man burning all his belongings in the middle

of the highway. The black smoke has reached a strange building with the word 'FEARLESS' on it, which turns out to be a church.

Carlos Leal's photographs show a disturbing reality that is sometimes difficult to identify. The photograph of the hand on a dark wall is not a harmless one either, as it actually shows the violent arrest of an African-American. Actually, Carlos Leal's photographic approach is close to rap, of which he was one of the representatives in Switzerland.

Alongside these images, other installations are more radical. In the exhibition, a group of photographs captures, hour by hour, a typical day of wandering for
a homeless person in Los Angeles. Another series of images pushes us to take a closer look at another homeless person sitting on a wheelchair, whose face is hidden under a blanket.

If Carlos Leal has photographed the contrasts between the daily life of the poor and the life of the inhabitants of the American city, the discrepancy is also that of an America on the decline which finds itself confronted with the vestiges of its past glory.

Thursday, June 8 2023, 6 p.m. - 9 p.m., in the presence of the artist Friday, June 9 2023, 11 a.m. - 12 p.m., in the presence of the artist