After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999-2000

The work of the Canadian artist Jeff Wall (Vancouver, 1946) has contributed to redefining photography as part of contemporary art. His practice of the tableau inherits from the history of painting its most fundamental feature: composition. The 36 works on display at La Virreina Center in Barcelona are extracted from a corpus of almost 200 photographic paintings made since 1978, an apparently scarce production – an average of four or five images per year – product of his work methodology, moving forward piece by piece to emphasize the autonomy of each painting. Every new image expands and increases the complexity of an open web of themes, motifs, figures, and analogies that move between cinema and documentary.