The Great Escape
I think the solitude is a gift. We are rounded every time by everybody, so it gives more value to the gift of solitude. The noise goes with us and subdue us. Noise generated by everything, by everyone. So, the silence is essential to the solitude.
To have solitude, you need silence. To have silence, you need solitude. Like the Art, the Nature experience, the landscape experience, is in a private and solitary level. In there we reveal our Self, our problems and thoughts. In there we look for confort and help. We look for calm and empathy. In the Art, Romantic authors like Huysmans or Friedrich, relying on their Lutheran faith, had a consideration of the landscape as a representation of our inner Self. So, what it should be represented in their art were our own soul, our own Self.
We look for meet to ourselves again in the landscape because we feel lost, confused and subdued into a society where the value of the Self depends of the value of the You, of the Us. Where the own thinking depends of fancy fashions, all kind of gurus, interested examples of the good and bad and the people around pressures. Where you are not longer you, just a reflected idea of a idilic you, that never will come true. Just a surreal and utopian you.
© Ricardo Dominguez Alcaraz
© Ricardo Dominguez Alcaraz
So we need an escape. And we find it in the sea, in the beaches and mountains. We find it in the Nature, following the mountain paths, in contemplate the sea while the sea breeze caress your hair, in feeling the sand down your feet while the sound of the waves relaxes you. We need to escape of the routine and of certain environment to be able to find ourselves. To get better of our wounds, to get stronger and put in order our lives.
The landscape helps us, the landscape allows us for it. In its solitude and silence, in its slowness and harmony, the troubles just get dissolved and your Self can talk freely again with your own voice and, then, breath again.
The landscape becomes in something existential, especially if it is inhabited, because you can poor out there your inner feelings. The landscape supports you and reflects your present time, your thoughts, your needs. The landscape exists because the landscape is yourself. So, representing the landscape is representing yourself. It is your way of looking who builds it and it give back to you what you look for and long for. You look for inner peace, the landscape gives it to you. You look for calm and serenity, the landscape gives to you solitude, silence and slowness. You look for help, the landscape acts a therapy.
So, “the Great Escape” project talks about us a human beings, as a sensitive beings that need a place, that need to hear and feel the silence, that need to be in solitude to be able to become in ourselves. This project talks about the required escape when all around you is moving fast and you need to stop down, when you need meditation and intimacy to talk to yourself, to be able to hear to yourself. “the Great Escape project” talks about these kind of places we go when we are overwhelmed, talks about how are these places and how these places makes the good to us. Talks about these places as an extension of yourself. Talks about these places where we just can be.
© Ricardo Dominguez Alcaraz
© Ricardo Dominguez Alcaraz
My work is focused in my physical environment, whatever be urban or natural. It is essential for me to be able to investigate this environment because I consider it a key to know better ourselves as society and, thus, myself.
Ricardo Dominguez Alcaraz is a landscape photographer based in Valencia, Spain, where he works and resides from his born in 1984. He is an Art Historian by the University of Valencia and a graduated photographer by the EASD of Valencia.
all images and text © Ricardo Dominguez Alcaraz