CAMINO. Sebastián Román

Sebas’s photographs are icily beautiful. Cities that are in our common imaginary, all familiar, if non-existent. We have the feeling that we know them because they are engraved in our cultural subconscious, however, they are the materialisation, in the form of an urban model, of an apocalyptic nightmare of their author, the world after the extinction of the human race. An uninhabited world of which only its material remains in the form of hyper-technological and cold cities.

When I contemplate Sebas’s photographs I can’t help wondering if this will be our future and, above all, I wonder what it is that has finished us off, a neutron bomb, a murderous virus released from some laboratory, the inability to procreate, the lack of resources after our insatiable consumption? Something so savagely effective that it kills humans, but not their creations.

It is chilling to contemplate in the photographs the vestige of man without man, the trace of his technological capacity but the certainty of his incapacity in the face of the merciless grandeur of nature or his own lack of self-control.

Three fundamental elements are present in Sebas’s creative process; on the one hand, the study of the vestige, of the trace, of the trace_ he makes his models from computer scrap, from what nobody wants any more, from the most characteristic material remains of our era: electronic scrap. An old memory card becomes, in Sebas’s mind, a Wall Street skyscraper; what was once a computer keyboard is, in his universe, the single-family houses that line a bay in a big city_Everything has another life in this author’s cosmos. This is precisely another of the elements Sebas plays with: recycling, the second chance of things, life beyond their usefulness.

The third aspect that should not be overlooked in the work of this artist is the playful aspect, the game. It is easy for me to imagine the child Sebas locked up for long hours playing with legos, tente, clicks. Creating alternative worlds, perhaps to scare away his fears, or perhaps to keep them in mind, or perhaps simply having fun, recreating the thousand and one futuristic films that are part of our vital film library.