Israel Ariño & Clara Gassull , Atlas (Circular Book), 2022

Atlas is a personal response to the challenge of representing the nomadic nature of experience. Israel Ariño’s gaze slips into reality and is transformed into an extraordinary and timeless world, captured and invented at the same time. Objects emerge slowly and the sensations evoked in his photographs appear only when the image materializes and the viewer looks at it. Only then can we see poetry, waiting, huddled in the treetops, or in a half-open figure, in the reflections of a river, in a ghostly jellyfish or in the joy of momentary abandon. Israel Ariño plays with different experiences and treats them as obsessive ideas that reveal themselves in multiple photographs. It is the creative manifestation of a personal landscape, the mapping of an imaginary space created by an inner entity that, although intentional, is never fully specified or clearly defined, like an ancient map in which the contours and outlines are lost in unexplored lands, which in turn invite new explorations and creations.

This book was unfortunately attacked by an unexpected mold growth that ruined its cover: hence the Circular books project was born, or how to give new life to publications that, for one reason or another, have been ruined by time or lost some of their initial value. In an era of greenwashing and economic speculation that naturally involves the publishing world as well, we wonder how to save, or if you prefer recycle all those publications that have suffered accidents, have ruined covers, poorly printed parts, have become partly moldy or simply become victims of the world of sales for the most disparate reasons.