Photographer Mar Sáez, portrait shooter

I think one of the biggest challenges for photographers working in the portrait genre, especially if it is not in controlled contexts, is gain your model's trustsomething in which Mar Saez (Murcia, 1983), perhaps because of her psychology studies, she is an expert.

Many will remember his exhibition at Alcobendas Art Center in 2018, where he collected snapshots of his fellow travelers in the BlaBlaCar, the road and its secondary roads immersed in darkness. Or when he followed Vera and Verónica with his camera for four years, a couple who opened the doors to intimacy and allowed him to delve into issues of gender and identity.

For an artist who feeds her work with social relationships, confinement had to be an inspiring period. That's when the project was born. third life (Rome), 2021-2022, which he now presents at the Daniel Cuevas gallery and which he prepared during his artistic residency at the Spanish Academy in Rome. As soon as the restrictions were lifted, he approached the groups of young people who met again on the beaches of Ostia, capturing that moment of reunion and recovering from lost physical contact.

[Natalia Castañeda, cartography the extinct]

The night, an inspiring moment for so many artists, allows Sáez to play with light and shadow, to which he adds careful compositions and textures. He places these new scenes in dialogue with details from classical paintings and sculptures, focusing on the chiaroscuro of the former and the penumbra of the latter. There are many moments of wonder, such as when he compares the bare neck of one of the girls with an oil painting that could be by Caravaggio. Sáez knows how to focus on what he wants to highlight. Think about the scene before, during and after. And his accomplices hear him.

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