Presented at the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in the Comunidad de Madrid, the exhibition Miguel Trillo.Double Exposure curated by Juan Albarrán offered a reconstruction of the first two solo exhibitions by Miguel Trillo (Jimena de la Frontera, Cádiz, 1953): PopPurri. Dos años de música pop en Madrid in the Ovidio Gallery in 1982 and Fotocopias. Madrid-London at Amadís Gallery in 1983. The exhibitions have been reconstructed as they were then.

In several ways, their displays -the exhibition strategies, the resources for presenting their photos- consciously moved away from the more conventional ways in which photography was exhibited in the few spaces that gave it shelter in the early eighties. This exhibition seeks to recontextualise the development of Trillo’s work in Madrid’s photographic culture, which underwent major transformations between the mid-’70s and mid-’80s, the period in which the photographer established the basis of his artistic project.

Miguel Trillo has reported on the evolution of subcultural aesthetics since the late 1970s, when he began to portray young people in concerts, parties and clubs, up to the present day. His work presents a collective portrait of a society in the process of transformation.
In 1978, Miguel Trillo took the first of a long series of photographs of groups playing live in order to portray the emergence of youth cultures that were proliferating in Madrid in the early eighties, when a diversification of musical aesthetics was beginning to take place that seemed to overcome previous hippie-folk fashions and attitudes.
These photographs were to form the basis of his work. He exhibited them in the Ovid Gallery in 1982, without a frame or glass, attached to wooden panels painted in pastel colours and with music playing in the background, with a casual, almost “pop” character. A few months later, in June 1983, Trillo exhibited for the first time the photographs of young people he had taken during the previous three years in Madrid and London. The images shown in the Sala Amadís were color photocopies of the photographs that had been positivized from slides. The artistic value of their work no longer resides in the original work or the limited print run, nor in the technical expertise of the photographer during the development process, nor even in the quality of the image or the professional finish of the montage. He used technology that was as innovative as it was poor and accessible – lower than high-tech – that connected with the spirit of do it yourself and was familiar to the protagonists of the shots and their potential audience.

Miguel Trillo’s photographs have been included in the most innovative Spanish publications of the last quarter century and have been exhibited in important national and international museums and centres such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, the Sala Canal de Isabel II in Madrid, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo and the Carroussel du Louvre in Paris. The Museo Reina Sofía has included his fanzine Rockocó and photographs from the early eighties in Collection 3: From Revolt to PostModernity (1962-1982), and the CA2M has 35 of his works in its collection.

Miguel Trillo. Double Exposure
Curated by Juan Albarrán
29 June – 22 October 2017
CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid
more information: http://ca2m.org/es/historico/item/2590-miguel-trillo 

A catalogue is published with texts by Juan Albarrán, José Manuel Costa, Olga Fernández López, Sara Fernández Miguélez, Amparo Lasén and Miguel Trillo, designed by Carlos T Mori.