How much importance do we give to our daily lives and everything that goes along with it? Are we at all interested in what’s going on around us? Do we pay attention to the small, seemingly banal details that we come across every day? Immersed in the daily hustle-and-bustle, it’s often hard for us to take a break and find the right mental state to appreciate the small anodyne gestures, particular situations or fleeting scenes of reality that surround us Fortunately, through their gaze, artists help us to become aware of all these things.

An acute interest in the «prodigious and endless, vulgar and magical» reality was precisely one of the constants in the works by the author Josep Pla (Palafrugell, 1897-1981), while it is also present at the core of the photos by Txema Salvans (Barcelona, 1971). As the artist himself claims: «I photograph the extraordinary aspects of daily life». Starting from this shared embryo, the exhibition delves into the creative processes of photography and writing to discover the shared elements in the perspective and works of the two artists.

Despite belonging to distinct eras and having notable differences in the artistic sphere, this comparative exploration of the works by Txema Salvans and Josep Pla nurtures a network of relationships as well as shared and revealing aesthetic interests. Using the precise adjective, the singular use of light and the expressive yet critical capacity of their respective perspectives, Txema Salvans and Josep Pla capture time and define its existential depths.

Immersing ourselves into this connection, we have found a suggestive framework that the texts by Josep Pla offer about the atmosphere of Txema Salvans’s photographs that are drawn from the projects Perfect Day, The Waiting Game, Sunday Morning and Los destrozos de una catástrofe (The Wreckage of a Catastrophe), some of which have never been seen before. Presented together, Pla’s literature and Salvan’s photography offer two singular yet complementary forms of engaging with the world. By having them engage in conversation, the result highlights the aspects that they share: curiosity, precision, attention to details, a local yet universal vision, and especially their ability to define time, whether with the pen or the camera.