In little over 20 years, autodidact and visually gifted Chilean-Canadian photographer Andrés Barría Davison has mastered the art of photo-poesy and tonal geometry to commemorate Mexico’s indigenous cultures, its enchanting fiestas, rites, and the tonal beauties of its peoples in the infinite quotidian. He conjugates the heroic symphony of Mexico’s vivid streets and squares, markets and rural villages with the mesmerizing visages, epic emotions and haunting landscapes to resurrect a land tormented between the sublime and the tragic, the transcendent and the immanent. Barria Davison’s camera, Mexico’s metaphor, is an exhilarating hermetic ladder ascending and descending the totalities of Mexico’s millenary and capacious existence ⎯ the divine, the indigenous and the profane ⎯ in order to evoke Mexico’s idyllic cosmic melancholy against its oblivion: a hurricane. Born in 1966 in an artistic milieu, Barría Davison relocated from Chile’s Straight of Magellan near his native Punta Arenas to Chile’s Atacama Desert, and immigrated to Vancouver, Canada in 1995, and to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico in 2004. Since 2011, he has won many awards, most notably from the Worldwide Photography Gala Awards for his two novel Mexican images “Two Sisters and the Cat” and an “Old Lady in the Kitchen,” also selected by magnum photographer Steve McCurry and exhibited at the Borges Cultural Gallery in Buenos Aires. Inspired by Casasola and Chambi, Alvarez Bravo, Hector Garcia and Iturbide, Ortiz Monasterio, Koudelka, Cruz, Meyer and Salgado, Barría Davison’s photo-poesy spans Mexico’s odyssey in images as liberating as oppressing. His photographs are fractals whose spirit is a Petrarchan sonnet. They conjugate cosmos and chaos, the divine and beings ⎯ the cosmotheandric ⎯ in light and shadow in a photographic poem whose octaves and sestets intimate presence and luminescence, and are resurrections of Mexico’s ancestral spirit gaze.
