WILDE Gallery is pleased to present Flohmarkt, Nacht - by Ricardo Okaranza, his first solo-show in Berlin. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with a critical essay by Wayne Baerwaldt, Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the ACAD, Calgary.

Basque-born Okaranza's approach to photography is entirely abstract and consciously devoid of any implied narrative. His pictures are always taken at night and although they suggest representational figuration, unavoidable through a camera lens and its mechanical recording of the image, the subjects portrayed are always considered for their painterly formalism alone. Light sources become dots, architectural structures become lines, spaces become colour fields and so on. The objects that lay abandoned in these pictures relinquish their respective utility in Okaranza's compositions, becoming forms analogous in shape and colour, but stripped of personal reference.

Wayne Baerwaldt writes of Okaranza's deserted urban landscapes that, "His frequently brooding, puzzling vistas of sobriety are contained by a re€ned, classical symmetry, characteristic of Okaranza's approach to image-making, and, in their drive to invoke the painted image, are as purposeful a departure from 'straight photography' as one can imagine."

Historical antecedents of the analog photographic process are eradicated in the methodology employed by Okaranza's contemporary technique, in which images are directly transposed as ink pigment on rag. A radical interpretation of Okaranza and his particular pathology would be to consider him as a latter-day watercolourist wherein the lens and subsequent image manipulation has replaced the brush.

Okaranza's works are strange hybrids that emanate a quiet sense of beauty, imbued by a surreal, painterly vividness, in which ominous horizons replete in densely saturated tones slowly creep over sombre surfaces, where activity has ceased. Uncanny and often unsettling in their emptiness, these are scenes of nocturnal alchemy, when reflections of street lamps, diffused neon and other sources of artificial urban light distil a curious mysticism in the otherwise mundane and disregarded spaces that play silent witness to our lives.