Once you enter Nicolas Franco’s “Land Without Bread”, it becomes hard to think objectively. Not because the exhibition is held at CCE (Spain Cultural Centre), which presents by itself a modernist architectural allure; not because the show is treated in a very clean, almost cold way in terms of aesthetic, easing the path through it. In this exhibition the works are arranged in a way that they invite the spectator to wander between them in a very paused manner, station by station; the artist constantly changes the platforms letting the audience stay with their minds fresh and willing the whole way, interacting with the pieces in various visual levels. Just one frame is encountered at the beginning of the show: a picture. An agave bush that immediately situates us in an arid and rural territory, where the artist’s ideas come from.

To enter the context, we must first understand the title of the show “Land Without Bread”. It comes from Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece “Las Hurdes, Land Without Bread”, documentary film shot in 1932. In this film Buñuel reflects in a most raw and sordid way the third-world reality of Las Hurdes, a rural region located in Spain. And like many other of Buñuel’s works, the cineaste uses reality in its grossest as a weapon against bourgeoisie society. It acts as a channel between the high spheres of society and this very poor society where bread wasn’t known, and for the same reason the survival practices had become somewhat extreme, or to the eyes of society, inhumane. This is the starting point from where the questioning of the artist begins. His curiosity and fascination is born from the politically incorrect content in Buñuel’s film. Nicolas manages to appreciate the ruthless message hidden behind the raw images, with the understanding that the more relentless a message is, it can have a bigger impact in a social sphere.

In the first room Nicolas works around the scene where a rooster is beheaded, and analyses it from different angles. The artist chooses this scene because it manages to resume the content of the whole documentary. It speaks about misery and ruthlessness; about death and life as fragments of time. These concepts are represented through frames extracted directly from the film, attached to specific quotes of the voice-off narrating the brutality – for our own eyes – of the manners of the people in Las Hurdes. Right next to this composition, we find to screens showing a mountainous landscape dyed in red in a 4K definition, intersected by the image of a rooster beating his wings, maybe before meeting his death. This image sets us in what may be the last vision of the animal before dying, arid landscape dyed in red.

By entering the second room: The Image an its Double, we enter a laboratory: extremely white and cold light, with photo frames scattered on the floor just like recently printed images under the analysis of an audience. In these frames is where we find the key element that connects us with Franco’s previous work, which has explored the investigation and treatment of anonymous archives in photography and video. The images were found in archives of anonymous videos from the Internet, and were chosen to represent and configure the documentary, (re) working them from his own aesthetic. They are intentionally scattered on the floor, putting them in a lower level than the spectator, referring to the counter position of society and misery; the gesture of “looking downwards” to the human waste, a wretched and alien reality.

Ultimately, hanging on the walls of this same room, there are some symbols extracted of the footage that were gathered and selected by the artist in order to represent death and life: a molar as the central object set upon a light box, a bull’s chub and a agave’s branch on which you can read the name “Romy”. These objects are also presented as objects under analysis, each one using an entire wall, separated from the other on neat platforms, just like symbols of a diseased and exponentially decadent society.