Review - Albarrán Cabrera, The radiance of Paradise

Last week I attended a zoom artist’s talk with Albarrán Cabrera (Angel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera) who shared their life and process from their studio in Barcelona. The gathered audience sat in the middle of their exquisite exhibition, The Radiance of Paradise, at Marshall Contemporary in Venice, CA that runs through October 23, 2021. It felt like a chapel of sorts as we were surrounded by their glowing works of color, platinum-palladium and metallic cyanotype prints, each mysterious and layered, magical and hidden. It was inspirational to understand the enthusiasm for their craft,: “The role is [to create] mystery. As a viewer, we are not much interested in looking at an obvious reality. If you look at a photograph where everything is clearly shown, there is no room for your imagination to play with that image and add your memories and your inner world to it. We love when in an image there is enough room to allow the viewer to enrich it with their memories, fears and questions. When that happens, momentary complicity between the photographer and the viewer is created. Tanizaki, Jung and other authors give us the guidelines about how to develop this mystery.”