Despite their Greek and Latin roots, the verb “photograph” and the words which derive from it are terms which are rather new in human history. They cannot even be traced back to 1822, when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce obtained the first fixed image by means of the heliographic system, since having associated with “Daguerre” with the aim of perfecting the invention, the first terms they employed to refer to the results obtained were the “daguerreotype” and other expressions which derived from the names of their creators. After several successful experiences, and once this new form of capturing and explaining the objective reality had gained general acceptance, soon the neologisms derived from the combination of “photo” (light) and “graph” (drawing) became widely known in France and England, with an immediate translation into all cultivated languages.

Despite the increasing popularity of photography in Europe and the United States, and an expanded interest in cameras and family pictures of weddings, births and baptisms celebrations, this did not mean at all that a new form of journalism or a new way of making art had taken place all of a sudden. It was however the foundations, reinforced some time later by the cinema and by the development of the image culture which they would have then to follow and which continue to grow today, but not as a consolidated art as is the case of painting and sculpture. Photography lovers, obliged to explore the new technical possibilities of these new tools which developed experiences that Leonardo da Vinci had already lived by means of the “camera obscura” but which evolved quickly and needed a slow laboratory process in order to produce tangible results, could not possibly innovate as to the aesthetic concepts. In spite of this, the graphic journalists’ determination, who improved the static snap and who were able to fix the dynamism of human movements, as well as photographers who followed the aesthetics of scenes and statues, allowed them to advance in the realization of their work as a result of a new art comparable to the ones already in existence.

These considerations lead us now to the work of Martí Català which is now on exhibition. Born in a family of renown Catalan photographers – Pere Català i Pic, his grandfather and Francesc Català-Roca, his father – he has always understood photography as the representation of the exterior reality, observed and oriented in a transcendent manner by the artist inside the photographer.

A meeting in Chicago with the American painter Matt Lamb and the Catalan sculptor Francesc Martí Rom allowed Martí Català to follow the two artists´ method of work and then convey his own view on artistic communication.  The exhibition is mainly an exhibition of photography, but Lamb and Martí Rom´s participation, each with two individual works and a joint work, has produced a three-dimensional effect which goes beyond the artistic expression of each author. The combination is the result of the integration of parts, and it works as a whole, with an independence that in this case demonstrates the significant development of photography.

Matt Lamb (Chicago, Illinois, 1932) is an expressionist and visceral artist, devoted to the representation of the spirit he finds inside every expression of life. A man of a refined taste, a cultivated person who has traveled and exhibited in many of the most prestigious galleries and museums around the world. When he paints, he expresses his feelings with a primitive strength. The adjective that best describes his painting would be “wild”, but in the noble meaning of the term, meaning the liberation of human powers, like the sun and the stars in the immensity of universe, or like trees and plants as they grow in the Amazonian jungle. As a passionate artist, a defender of the Roman Catholic faith, he expresses by the strength of his colors and the shape of his figures, the divine providence, the desire for human perfectionism.

Martí Rom (Barcelona, 1955) linked by familiar reasons to Mont-roig, met Lamb on the occasion of his visit to the town of Tarragona, with the aim of following the first artistic expressions of Joan Miró. They became friends and the painter offered the sculptor to exhibit together in several American and European galleries where he regularly worked. And though Martí Rom’s work originates in tangible reality and established forms, his use of materials and his manner of recreating by means of fragments the human figure and the objects which best represent the human being, allowed this connection of criteria.

And Lamb and Martí Rom’s meeting brings then the connection with Martí Català Pedersen (Barcelona, 1961), the work of whom is now on exhibition. And this exhibition is, as I have mentioned before, the result of the development of photography, an independent expression of the author’s art. In this manner, the spirit that Lamb finds in the space and in the inside of the human being, and Martí Rom’s sculptural search in the formal reality acquire a new dimension in Martí Català’s photography.