The City of Soul, Speed, and a Racing Pulse


What city could be better suited for Alfonso Zubiaga’s neues Sehen of the metropolis than New York – the city that never sleeps, the pulsing metropolis whose pulse verily throbs on the streets. Zubiaga has developed his own signature look for architectural representation in these images, one that unites abstraction and the figurative and removes any trace of standstill from the seemingly unmoving image by accelerating it into motion. We find ourselves simultaneously in both the present and the future. Likewise the images are both real and virtual at the same time; they are groundbreaking and yet refer to that which will follow.


Zubiaga’s photos are a futuristic adventure through the streets of the modern metropolis. To everything that painters of the last century have found theatrical, apocalyptical, surreal, and visionary about urban scenarios, he now adds a sense of adventure and speed.


In the style of the futurists, Zubiaga has found a way to generate a whole entity out of time and space. The Spanish artist builds his photographic works on this foundation and then fantastically augments them digitally. Different from the futurists’ works, however, Zubiaga’s works have a very clear focus. In one he hones in on the apex of a New York skyscraper, while in another he looks into the depths of the city, through the canyon-like streets, to find a yellow taxi. Around this pivotal point, however, our view on the world is fragmented into multiple layered visions as through viewed through a kaleidoscope. This mode of seeing challenges us to focus and de-focus simultaneously: the eye wanders constantly and yet always returns to the central focal point.