The only inscription on this wall is ornament: a narrow band of glazed tiles printed with a repeating lozenge motif, a geometric sentence running left to right across the middle of the frame. Below and above it, plain square tiles carry nothing but their own faint scratches and a penciled mark or two, the small graffiti of daily use. Masats has aimed his camera at a surface most photographers would walk straight past, and made its patterned stripe the spine of the picture.
Everything then depends on the light, which enters low and from the side, grazing the tiles until each one lifts slightly from its neighbour and the whole grid turns tactile. A wrought-iron bracket juts from the upper left and lays down a fan of parallel diagonal shadows, sharp as ruled lines, cutting against the horizontal course of the frieze. The tonal range is wide and beautifully held, from the deep unlit plaster at the top to the pale, softly modelled faces of the lower tiles.
That an image this austere comes from the outset of Masats’s career tells us how early his formal intelligence arrived, long before the Sanfermines, the boxing of Neutral Corner, or the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. Within the AFAL circle that modernised Spanish photography, he could turn from crowded human theatre to pure abstraction without strain. Printed later in gelatin silver, the sheet rewards close looking: the granular tooth of the plaster, the sheen of glaze, the crisp edges of shadow all rendered in a controlled, silvery scale, tile by tile, shadow by shadow.
The only inscription on this wall is ornament: a narrow band of glazed tiles printed with a repeating lozenge motif, a geometric sentence running left to right across the middle of the frame. Below and above it, plain square tiles carry nothing but their own faint scratches and a penciled mark or two, the small graffiti of daily use. Masats has aimed his camera at a surface most photographers would walk straight past, and made its patterned stripe the spine of the picture.
Everything then depends on the light, which enters low and from the side, grazing the tiles until each one lifts slightly from its neighbour and the whole grid turns tactile. A wrought-iron bracket juts from the upper left and lays down a fan of parallel diagonal shadows, sharp as ruled lines, cutting against the horizontal course of the frieze. The tonal range is wide and beautifully held, from the deep unlit plaster at the top to the pale, softly modelled faces of the lower tiles.
That an image this austere comes from the outset of Masats’s career tells us how early his formal intelligence arrived, long before the Sanfermines, the boxing of Neutral Corner, or the Premio Nacional de Fotografía. Within the AFAL circle that modernised Spanish photography, he could turn from crowded human theatre to pure abstraction without strain. Printed later in gelatin silver, the sheet rewards close looking: the granular tooth of the plaster, the sheen of glaze, the crisp edges of shadow all rendered in a controlled, silvery scale, tile by tile, shadow by shadow.