In all of this, nature is the protagonist

Introduction

Jose Quintanilla’s photographic landscapes trace the afterlife of place. Within them, past and present coexist in a kind of meditative tension, though its emphasis shifts from one series to another. At times it emerges through neglect or simple forgetfulness as societies strain toward the future, leaving abandoned architectural spaces to nature’s reclamation. Elsewhere the landscape itself bears the scars of environmental degradation.

Photography has the curious capacity to render ruin and decay aesthetically compelling. Removed from the intimacy of physical encounter, light, texture, and nostalgia can lend decrepitude a beguilingly romantic aura, safely quarantined within the rectilinear borders of the image. Quintanilla’s work, however, subtly unsettles that comfortable sensibility. He asks us to look more closely and think more deeply: to consider the implications of what we see rather than simply consume the familiar pleasures of the picturesque. His approach is insistent but never heavy-handed. The images draw us in; it is only later that we begin to sense their more disconcerting undertow.

There is a further irony lingering in the subsoil of these images. They reveal the extent to which landscapes are shaped by shifting cultural tastes and aspirations. In this sense, Quintanilla invites us to view the work through an art-historical lens: to recognise the interplay between former ideals and contemporary anxieties.

By the late eighteenth century, for example, landscape gardening had become an art form in its own right. Rejecting the rigid geometries of the Baroque, such gardens cultivated a freer, though carefully orchestrated, naturalism suggestive of a latter-day Arcadia. Later, with the rise of modernism and the bourgeoisie, gardens became more intimate in scale while embracing the colour and immediacy associated with Impressionism.

Across his photographic series, Jose Quintanilla explores the unfolding dialogue between rebirth and what remains. In doing so, he reveals how cultural aspirations persist within the landscape long after the social worlds that produced them have faded.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

What first drew you to photography as your medium of expression?

My relationship with photography came about somewhat by chance as a result of my professional career. I studied art direction and worked for many years in advertising and direct marketing, with a heavy involvement in the printing processes employed in the graphic arts. My artistic practice began as an illustrator and visual artist, working with airbrushing and traditional handcrafted processes.

In 2007, feeling burnt out by commercial work, I launched a pioneering company in Madrid focused on digital fine-art printing for photography and art reproduction. It was through my collaboration with photographers and artists that I began to develop an interest in photography as a path for my own artistic development. By chance, a gallery director discovered some prints I was working on in my studio and invited me to be part of a group exhibition on landscape. That was the moment I realised that I could build an artistic career with photography as its foundation.

How did ‘Mi Casa, Mi Árbol’ [my house, my tree] come about?

This work connects directly with my childhood, with my roots. I was born in Yecla, a town in southeastern Spain very close to Don Quixote’s La Mancha. It is a region of flat landscapes where your gaze gets lost among cereal fields, vineyards, and olive trees. As a child, our family spent the summer visiting my father’s relatives in the countryside. There they had very few economic resources. They didn’t even have a car to go into town for supplies and had to travel by mule-drawn cart.

At that time, many people lived in the countryside working land that they leased. Beyond the farmhouses, there were small shelters where farmers could spend the night with the animals they used to plough the fields. These shelters were often accompanied by a single tree, both for shade and to mark the building’s location so it could be seen from far away. I have always been fascinated by these constructions – now abandoned – and their relationship with nature.

You present this work like vintage objects. How did you go about this and why?

My work has always drawn a strong relationship between landscape and memory. And in this series, I wanted to convey a sense of nostalgia. I remembered the old family photographs that my maternal grandmother kept in a tin box. Photographs of people, many of whom I had never met. I loved how the family would gather around those pictures to tell stories about each person and the history of these places. So, in creating these prints, I decided to intervene physically. I soaked the paper in tea to create a patina of age before printing and distressing them with stains, sanding, and bleach so they took on the appearance of found objects.

‘Transcurso’ also explores abandonment, but this time in terms of an inundation by nature.

This series emerged while I was working on ‘Mi Casa, Mi Árbol’. As I searched for those solitary houses, I kept discovering abandoned ruins overgrown with weeds. For the first series, I had used a lens with a long focal length, to obtain a flat and distant perspective. However, for ‘Transcurso’, I felt a closer point of view would help to create a sense of immersion in the space that fills the entire scene, with few references to the wider surroundings.

This work was made at a time when I was losing very close loved ones and it reflects the flow of time; the way its course affects us not only physically, but also spiritually. It suggests the unstoppable passage of time through an analogy between the ceaseless cycles of natural and the ruin as a symbol of the past. Traces of those who had lived there, now long gone, their memory held within stones and walls that once had function and meaning.

The process of the human-made returning to nature is the theme of both ‘Memorabilia’ and ‘El Cuarto Paisaje’. In ‘Memorabilia’ you depict architectural follies from the Romantic (and early Industrial) Age that are becoming lost in the undergrowth. In these images, what is it you wish to communicate to today’s viewer?

This project began somewhat by chance. I came across a ruined structure in the grounds of an abandoned mansion and photographed it simply because it was aesthetically appealing. I later discovered that this was a folly – the kind purpose-build ruin that became fashionable among the wealthy classes in the nineteenth century. Emerging in England and Germany, these structures were designed to echo the classical Greco-Roman architecture seen by young northern European bourgeois who travelled to Italy on the Grand Tour. By appropriating its symbology and iconography, such follies sought to reference a common cultural past while relocating and containing it in carefully landscaped gardens and estates.

My research led me to travel across Europe searching for these architectural follies. I consider them to be meta-ruins because, although they were originally built as fake ruins, nearly two centuries have passed since their construction, so that today we could consider them authentic in their way: real ruins of fake ruins.

I photographed these places using black and white film. Once digitised, I coloured the images on my computer, creating a fake image of a fake antiquity. It was my way of delving deeper into this concept of the meta-ruin.

[Left] © Jose Quintanilla ‘El Cuarto Paisaje #04’ 2024 from the series ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’
[Right] © Jose Quintanilla ‘El Cuarto Paisaje #01B’ 2022 from the series ‘El cuarto paisaje’

When considering ‘El Cuarto Paisaje’, what do you mean by the term ‘fourth landscape’?

The French landscape architect Gilles Clément coined the term Third Landscape to describe the residual physical spaces where nature resists. But in these images, we find illegal landfills, abandoned infrastructure, compromised ecosystems… so familiar today that they often go unnoticed or even begin to be perceived as ‘natural’. For me, this is what constitutes a contemporary Fourth Landscape: the degradation of the environment itself as a future ruin.

‘El Cuarto Paisaje’ is the overarching title of what will become an ongoing set of series. The first of the sub-series was inspired by a phrase that appears in several works by Nicolas Poussin: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’. [The Latin phrase roughly translates as ‘even in Arcadia, there am I’. It is Death speaking, reminding us that nowhere, not even the pastoral paradise of Arcadia, is beyond his reach.]. I am very fond of painting, especially from the Romantic era and the schools that preceded it. They have greatly influenced me aesthetically. Here, I attempt to show idealised landscapes close to the idea of Arcadia that nonetheless suffer from significant degradation due to human action.

[Left] © Jose Quintanilla ‘La Cabaña de Rousseau #07’ 2023
[Right] © Jose Quintanilla ‘La Cabaña de Rousseau #01’ 2023

‘La Cabaña de Rousseau’ centres on the now abandoned cottage in which the French philosopher spent his final years. How did you come to explore this area and what did you find?

While I was searching for locations for the ‘Memorabilia’ project, I discovered the village of Ermenonville in France, about an hour from Paris. It was here that the Marquis de Girardin had built a château surrounded by vast gardens in the English style. The landscaping was replete with various follies and an artificial lake containing an island. A great admirer of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Marquis prepared a section of the palace for Jean-Jacques to spend his final weeks, but Rousseau declined. Instead, he built a stone hut in a nearby forest – a humble environment for solitude and reflection very much in keeping with his philosophical ideals. Following Rousseau’s death in 1778, the Marquis had a tomb constructed on the lake island.

What I eventually discovered was that the place where one of the fathers of the French nation had passed away lay abandoned in an area so overgrown that it remains practically inaccessible. I decided to find it and photograph it. Later, I published this work as a small travel book, telling the story of Rousseau’s lost cabin and the great thinker whose remains now rest, not in the island tomb, but in the Panthéon in Paris.

Finally, in ‘Giverny 2.0’ you created imagery in Monet’s famous garden.

I have always admired Monet’s work and the wider Impressionist movement. In 2023, I travelled from Paris to Giverny to see the famous garden where he lived during his final years and experience it firsthand. The visit was somewhat disappointing. Aside from the crowds of tourists and long queues, the garden was certainly beautiful, but it wasn’t the garden I had imagined from the master’s paintings. In fact, although I took photos of the place, they stayed in a drawer for almost two years because I didn’t see any sense in simply doing a project about gardens.

This experience sparked my interest in understanding how the Impressionists emerged. I began to read up on the subject. The first thing I discovered was that photography had a lot to do with it – its appearance in the early nineteenth century pushed young painters to seek new forms of expression. It no longer made sense to represent reality, but rather to interpret it. Consequently, while photographers tried to emulate pictorial language, painters adapted photographic characteristics: asymmetrical framing, working in the open air, and, above all, the obsession with capturing the moment.

Thinking about this I came to understand the difference between representing reality (the photographic image) versus interpreting reality (the pictorial image). Taking this thought, I asked myself: what would happen if I processed a photograph as if I were an Impressionist painter? And so, by applying pictorial techniques and resources, I achieve an image that is closer to painting than it is to photography, even though it began with a photographic negative.

The result is clearly not simply a recreation of Monet’s visual language. How do you see the relationship between your technique and those of the man who made the garden famous?

This work explores the limits of photography, searching for new forms of visual expression. I believe that photographic language is currently showing signs of exhaustion. We all carry a camera in our pockets, producing millions of photographs that are instantly distributed through social media. Meanwhile, the emergence of new technologies – especially Artificial Intelligence – has ended the supposed truthfulness of photographic images. I believe we are witnessing a major revolution, much like when photography forced painting to reinvent itself through Impressionism and all the subsequent avant-garde movements that led to abstract art, reaching one of the most interesting periods of painting in art history.

‘Giverny 2.0’ is then a tribute both to photography and to Monet as a representative of the Impressionist movement that broke with academic tradition. And what better way to do so than with photographs taken in the very garden that brought him such fame.

[Left] Jose Quintanilla viewing the installation of his work ‘Giverny 2.0’ at the CentroCentro (art centre) in Madrid, 2026 (photo: Amapola Creativa)
[Upper Right] © Jose Quintanilla ‘Mi casa, mi árbol #05’ 2012
[Lower Right] © Jose Quintanilla ‘Memorabilia #23’ 2021

This is a fascinating progression of photographic series. It spans the parched simplicity of abandonment through to the lush abundance of a carefully tended garden. And while that can seem like two extremes, I sense the threads of a continuous underlying visual discourse.

I appreciate that you perceive the common threads underlying my work. In all of this, nature is the protagonist. The other thematic pillars are memory and human action, whether obvious or subtle. I am always speaking about our relationship with nature, about how human beings coexist within their environment. How they try to domesticate and adapt it to their needs, humanise it. My deep concern is that this obsession with controlling and exploiting nature is leading us toward existential collapse.

In making these bodies of work, what have you learned about yourself that you did not previously know or understand?

For me, the most interesting thing about photography – and this is a very personal observation – is that it has saved me many hours of therapy. When I deeply analyse the subjects I address, the obsessions that drive my various searches, and reflect upon the results, I come to realise how the subconscious steers my thoughts in a specific direction. When I finally manage to execute and complete the work, a part of me is healed. I dedicate many hours to reading and research for the various projects I undertake, and this allows me to detach myself for a while from the complex and turbulent times that humanity is currently experiencing.

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photo: syxestudio

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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